Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FORMS of literature, bad science fiction is perhaps the least easily adapted for the stage--a point painfully demonstrated in the Dunster House production of Ray Bradbury's Pillar of Fire...
...fact, Pillar of Fire would have been better conceived as a comedy; two-dimensional science fiction that tries to be serious inevitably falls flat in the three dimensions of the stage. As it is, this is one play that deserves to be teleported into hyperspace...
James has constructed a slick and engaging plot for A Taste for Death. But what makes her work more than just well-polished fiction is her consistently vivid characterizations and keen insights into daily human experience. Aside from a solid mystery, A Taste for Death is an effective psychological exploration of post-war British culture. James investigates the social mores of a defunct nobility and the predicaments of the working class, as well as the poltical attitudes of radical Labour extremists...
...despite the richness of James' brand of fiction, the book never seems overburdened or contrived. Her smooth unravelling of the mystery's details works hand-in-hand with her psychological portraits to create a work that is at once sheer entertainment and complex social inquiry. A Taste for Death may not go down in literary history as a great British novel, but it is a great British mystery...
Probably so. But skipping The Pianoplayers is not a good idea. Burgess, 69, has recaptured the same linguistic verve and inventiveness that marked his earlier fiction, especially The Doctor Is Sick (1960) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). He has also created a heroine to rival, in nearly every respect, the comically seedy poet Enderby, hero of four Burgess novels. Ellen Henshaw is an old woman living in the south of France when she decides to set down her memoirs, with the stenographic assistance of one Rolf Marcus, an itinerant and blocked American journalist who needs the lodgings that...