Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...judges honored August Wilson's Fences, a play about a black family in the 1950s. In doing so, however, the Pulitzer board overruled a recommendation by its three-member nominating jury, whose choice was Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. Peter Taylor, 70, an acclaimed short-story writer, won the fiction prize for his first novel in 36 years, A Summons to Memphis...
Where does Percy stand with the release of The Thanatos Syndrome, his newest and least engaging piece of fiction? The writing here is piquant, elegant, well-whittled, and striking. And though the stakes are high--eugenics, AIDS, nuclear waste, and existential terror--one can't help thinking midway through this novel: Percy's all dressed up with no place...
...nation that mistakenly assumes only the President's finger is ever on the button, this little-known fact will come as a disconcerting discovery. In his first novel, State Scarlet (Putnam; $18.95), David Aaron, a top staffer at the National Security Council during the Carter Administration, uses fiction to show how the nation's command, control and communications system, known as C 3, could spin out of control during a crisis...
This, his most recent novel, combines the fantasy and magic that are the trademark of current Latin American fiction, but also of the author's own brand of passion and sexual intrigue. It is a virtuosic work that takes on a variety of ideas and stories, remaining engaging throughout its many facets. And still it attempts to go beyond its technical workmanship. It has a sympathetic message to deliver, revealed in the closing words: "More than to hug them, I want ... to talk to them ... and it could even be ... that we would understand each other...
...allocation formulas. But legislators know that it is hard to take credit for such indirect funding in a 30-second campaign spot. So in 1982 Congress decided to build a few roads and add a few expressway exits on their own. Thus was born the demonstration project, a legislative fiction that claimed these congressional highways, byways, off-ramps and repair programs were merely scientific experiments to advance the art of roadbuilding...