Word: fictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact, this is an episode in Jeffrey Archer's First Among Equals, a 1984 best seller. But if truth is often stranger than fiction, there are also fewer happy endings. So it was for Archer, 46, deputy chairman of the Conservative ! Party and the author of six top-selling novels, including Kane and Abel and the current best seller A Matter of Honor. Last week the Sunday News of the World (circ. 4.8 million) carried a five-page story claiming that Archer had offered Prostitute Monica Coghlan (pounds)2,000 ($2,800) to pay for a trip abroad to avoid...
...title is enough to make you weep. This is not an erotic manual or a behavioral study, nor is it a blue novel. A slight but charming romantic comedy is imprisoned here, shut off by an oafish handle from its natural audience of fairly sophisticated fiction readers and gift givers...
Forget the business about novellas and stories in the subtitle. Author Andre Dubus' latest collection of short fiction contains six pieces, four of them somewhat longer than the other two. It is Dubus' main title that calls for scrutiny. The Last Worthless Evening is not taken from any of the works included in the book; it alludes instead to a passage from William Faulkner's The Bear that amounts to a dirge for man's despoliation of the New World. In the past, Dubus has called his collections names such as Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times...
This statement lacks the demonstrable authenticity that appears so consistently in all of Dubus' fiction, including the stories in this book. Abstract critiques of U.S. society seem puny amid the welter of details and telling observations that the author provides. In Molly, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, goes riding with her new boyfriend toward a beach on the Atlantic. She looks out the window at a succession of small, working-class houses: "In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought...
...into print nowadays unless they are lumped in with the latest unemployment figures or, even worse, written up in the police blotters of local papers. Dubus may have decided that such wasted lives are America's fault; he may even be right. But the case made by his fiction is far more complex and intriguing. In Rose, a nameless middle-age narrator starts chatting casually about a fellow habitue of Timmy's, a neighborhood bar in a town, once again in Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River. Her name is Rose; she is disheveled, disreputable, and she has a past that...