Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also got his start in Boston clubs) seems in danger of boxing himself into...
...results were In Patagonia (1977) and The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), two remarkable books that demonstrated enviable gifts for observation, description and narrative invention. The Songlines brings these qualities to high relief, combining the conventions of travel writing, the patterns of the philosophical essay and the strategies of fiction. The work is obviously based on fact and personal experience, although Chatwin declares that much of it is literary concoction. In short, The Songlines is a book whose resistance to definition places it, by default, into the increasingly liberal category of the novel...
...whatever means, the vast majority of crime writers reconcile themselves to return engagements. Thus despite the dangers, or at least doldrums, of repetition, series account for most of the current crop of top crime fiction. Perhaps the most impressive cumulative performance comes from Sir John Appleby, the fictional retired head of Scotland Yard and the signature detective of Michael Innes, a.k.a. J.I.M. Stewart, 80, a retired Oxford don who has been crafting wry, sprightly, often fanciful mysteries for more than half a century. The "ex-bobby," as he coyly calls himself, reappears in an umpteenth adventure, Appleby and the Ospreys...
...wants to see succeed. Alas, it is harder to imagine a return of the investigative journalist who digs through the smoldering ashes of two-decades-old news in David Quammen's The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Doubleday; 350 pages; $17.95). The story is built on three staples of spy fiction: the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald spent time in the Soviet Union and must have had contact with the KGB; the inability of the CIA, whenever confronted with a Soviet defector, to know whether he is a font of information or a plant aimed at disinformation; and the too often...
Mysteries, short stories, romances and first novels make up an all- fiction fiesta of summer reading for hammock, porch and beach...