Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perfume is no routine piece of parlor fiction. Rather, it is an unusually intriguing sensual exploration of human desire and the destructive conseqences of searching for power and love. If nothing else, Perfume is a testimony to the power of the written word. Suskind possesses a brutally honest, sadistically sensitive style that cannot but enthrall and challenge the imagination...
...Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, 66, has gracefully shattered the rules. In her best and most ambitious tale to date, A Taste for Death -- her ninth mystery novel in 24 years -- James has become a kind of Le Carre of crime, blending the calmer depths of mainstream fiction with the white rapids of the genre, to produce something quite different indeed...
...acquired in jobs ranging from rewrite man on the Wall Street Journal to publisher of a suburban New York weekly. He is the author of Simple Justice (1976), an acclaimed history of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segregation in U.S. public schools. Kluger, who has also published fiction, brings a novelist's imagination to some vivid material...
Would that Klass had lavished a little more artistic pretension on her fiction. Written at different times while Klass was a graduate student in zoology, doing field work in Central America, living in Rome and attending medical school, these stories document in theme--rather than form--a disenchantment with sameness. The thematic concerns are all the same. The stories all speak of restless students who are usually also relentless travelers. You get the feeling there are only a few real characters, chopped up and shooed into all the stories...
Writers are usually touchy about discussing this subject. But faced with an eager and influential audience, Conroy suggested a truth common to most readers: they are less interested in distinctions of fact and fiction than in rousing stories and lively characters. The Prince of Tides provides plenty of both. There is the time Grandma tried out a coffin at the local funeral home and nearly frightened Ruby Blankenship to death. There is Grandpa, who can water-ski 40 miles and carries a 90-lb. cross through town every Good Friday. Conroy can be shameless in his extravagances of language...