Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Home means no freedom; freedom means no home. That is the dilemma facing all the tumbledown souls who drift through the peeling Springsteen homes and long, open highways of Jayne Anne Phillips' fiction. Castoffs from the counterculture, sleeping on floors or living in cars, unsure of where they stand in time or space, few of them know how to keep jobs, let alone take care of themselves. Phillips' characters lack purpose and authority. Their world is fluid, but they do not quite go under. They simply float...
Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies Carol O. Herron, who came to Harvard this year to augment the department's literature offerings, this spring taught a course on Afro-American poetry. Herron, who previously studied Latin American epic fiction on a Fulbright Award in Mexico, is an expert on Milton and the epic. "My work involves showing the way in which the Afro-American epic has developed in America with African, American and European sources," she says...
Author Louis Auchincloss has produced some 30 books of fiction, an impressive amount in anyone's case, but even more so for a Wall Street lawyer, recently retired, who writes in his spare time. This productivity has been devoted primarily to variations on a central theme: the manners and mores of well-to- do New Yorkers, not restricted to the fabled 400 of old Manhattan society but not much exceeding a few thousand either. There are those who think this subject was pretty well exhausted by the time Henry James and Edith Wharton got through with it. Others argue that...
Many intellectuals consider Children of the Arbat to be the most important work of fiction by a Soviet author since Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, not least because it treats subjects that Soviet literature has never dealt with before. Rybakov's book is an attempt to come to literary terms with the Stalin era, just as Pasternak tried to give literary meaning to the Russian revolution and civil war of his own generation. But unlike Doctor Zhivago, which first appeared in Italian, Children of the Arbat is coming out in its author's native land and language...
Like Solzhenitsyn's work, Children of the Arbat is highly autobiographical and is as much nonfiction as fiction. Rybakov spent his childhood at 51 Arbat Street, where much of the action takes place. Many of the book's characters, including Stalin, his private secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev and Sergei Kirov, are real people. Most of the fictional characters are also patterned after actual Soviet citizens...