Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three of Author Walker Percy's five previous novels bear titles with implications of apocalypse: The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming. The other two, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, are exceptions in name only. For all of Percy's fiction revolves around a central question: can humane, civilized life survive this murderous, mechanized century? Details change from book to book, but a number of constants recur. The hero is typically a Southerner and a loner, a weirdo in the eyes of friends and relatives, whose despair at the decline of civilization has lured him into alcoholism...
...actual past can create electrifying effects. Witness the towering achievements of War and Peace or the enduring popular appeal of Gone With the Wind. The formula has its pitfalls, of course, in the hands of the inept: cardboard people posing stiffly in front of papier-mache reconstructions. Even so, fiction that dovetails with fact remains alluring to authors and readers alike...
...speculation about his wife's overreaching made the President angrier than any other aspect of the controversy over the Tower report. Reagan was so irked at the Dragon Lady image that he broke his rule of silence during a photo session to denounce the Nancy stories as "despicable fiction" by people who "should be ashamed of themselves." Friends rushed to the First Lady's defense. "Rubbish," said Columnist George Will of the flood of press accounts. The First Lady shrugged off the accusations as "ridiculous." Indeed, while she is by no means bashful about offering advice to her husband...
...whole new meaning, can help your child develop the capacities to become a fulfilled speaking subject, and prepare him to confront successfully the challenge offered by each of life's aporias. He'll learn to undermine the binary oppositions that separate work and play, mom and dad, fact and fiction. Of course, this creates problems when Junior lies to mom and swears he's telling the truth...
Into this spiraling degeneracy infiltrates a mysterious new government-produced drug that gradually draws the book's characters together as it kills off the population. A little more science fiction than highway funds and drinking laws--but also a lot quicker...