Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...safe endeavor. The audience for such a book is already converted: the evil of owning men, women and children as chattel is shamefully obvious to everyone, and the heroes and villains are easy to tell apart. But it is precisely the contemporary consensus on human bondage that makes serious fiction on this subject so rare and so difficult to achieve. Imaginative literature at its best does not reinforce received opinions but disturbs them, puts them to the test of experience relived. And what is obvious to readers now -- that slavery was a moral abomination -- did not appear as unchallenged truth...
...FICTION...
...opening chapter of this first novel is also, in a traditional sense, the conclusion of the tale. Charles Baxter, 40, the author of two fine collections of short stories, has not only come across an interesting idea for an experimental narrative but has managed to translate it into convincing fiction. The book's epigraph, from Kierkegaard, provides the key: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards...
...central fiction about the hard-cover repackaging of Answered Prayers is the presumption that it is a novel, unfinished or otherwise. Rather, it is an act of merchandising that will divert attention from A Capote Reader, a generous collection of traditional fiction and imaginative journalism that invites renewed appreciation of one of the most gifted writers of his generation. "He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm," wrote Norman Mailer nearly 30 years ago. The early Southern stories have the delicate tinkle of glasses of iced tea; a touch sweet, perhaps, but clean and cool. "The Headless...
...Douglas Adams may not be the best 35-year-old British science- fiction writer, but he is surely the tallest. So are his tales, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, his wacko 1979 cult favorite, to this delightfully busy mystery, set in the present but wandering through past and future. Dirk Gently, the holistic detective ("We solve the whole crime; we find the whole person"), is diverted from a career of finding vanished cats by a daunting assignment: assist a former Cambridge classmate who is wanted for murder and -- oh, yes -- save the human race from impending extinction...