Word: fictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first rise in nearly three years. Several major banks soon followed suit. Two days later, seven leading banks had announced that they would take the serious step of reclassifying their loans to Brazil to a "nonperforming" status. That means that the banks' books will no longer maintain the fiction that Brazil is still paying interest. The decision will sharply slash the lenders' first quarter profits...
...advances can cause frissons in the worlds of publishing and journalism, where the hired hands ordinarily labor for far less. Destiny will be talked about, doubtless picked up by a few people new to the current state of the romance genre and hence ignorant of just how wretched such fiction is required to be. There will be cries of disbelief; Sally Beauman may want her pseudonym back...
...such a sweeping, unresolved saga be captured in fiction? In her eight previous novels, Nadine Gordimer has offered some excellent answers. She has fused her native land's agonies and contradictions into intense portraits of ordinary lives: that of a reactionary but troubled landowner (The Conservationist), for example, or of a white housewife caught up in the melee of a successful black revolution (July's People). A Sport of Nature is no less detailed and gripping than its predecessors, but its reach is more ambitious: a panoramic view not only of what has already taken place in South Africa...
...fantastical novels, Midnight's Children and Shame, that tell the recent history of India and Pakistan. As an Indian who grew up with his independent motherland in its infancy, and as a fabulist whose bravura acts of invention bring to mind the "magic realism" of Latin American fiction, Rushdie felt himself obscurely allied with the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. Last summer he accepted the invitation of the Sandinista leadership to inspect the seven-year-old revolution. For three weeks he attended rallies, journeyed to the Honduran border and hung out with the comandantes, eating turtle and chatting about literature...
Here and there, Rushdie does note a few flaws in the revolutionary state. His most vexing concern is that a government of writers -- both President Daniel Ortega and his wife have published verse, while Vice President Sergio Ramirez produces fiction -- has also become a government of censors. Nor does he flinch from recording the naivete of teenage soldiers eager for battle. Yet such imperfections are not enough to prevent him from rooting for what he regards as a brave Nicaraguan David up against the North American Goliath. "Were these dictators in the making?" he asks of his ostentatious hosts...