Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...connoisseur-eat-connoisseur world out there: lies, low blows, sexual politics, thievery, bribery, betrayal and greed. In his first foray into popular fiction, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor in chief of Connoisseur magazine, takes us into the international art arena, where a masterpiece has come up for auction. On the block is the Marchesa Odescalchi, a sexy full-length portrait by the 17th century Spanish master Diego Velasquez of his alleged mistress. Experts predict that the portrait will bring at least $11 million, an auction record for a single painting. Among the main...
...England-born, old England-based Paul Theroux knows how to take care of literary business. Since 1967 he has published ten novels, four novellas, three short-story collections and five travel books, including The Great Railway Bazaar. He has paid his dues as an essayist and reviewer; his varied fiction has harmonized into a respected oeuvre; and he has had a glamorous payday: his 1982 novel The Mosquito Coast is, as they say, soon to be a major motion picture...
...contemporary manners and mores. Couples (1968), the three Rabbit novels, the two collections of stories about the Jewish writer and malingerer Henry Bech, all present surfaces so intriguing that it is possible to ignore their depths. But a Protestant sense of sin peeks through most of Updike's fiction -- sometimes, as in A Month of Sundays (1975), expressed directly by an agonized clerical narrator. Roger Lambert, another lapsed preacher, comes from this austere region of Updike's imagination, suffering not doubts now but numbness. It is the job of Roger's Version to stir its hero back to moral life...
...create these tales Rendell has spent quite a lot of time thinking about unpleasant people. The central character in Live Flesh, Rendell's 31st book of fiction in 22 years, is a rapist, mutilator and murderer. A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell's first under a new pen name, Barbara Vine, imagines a murder preceded by intimations of incest, infanticide and homosexual child molestation, all within the bosom of an apparently conventional and loving clan...
...compartments were constructed when she left suburban journalism in East London and its Essex suburbs at the time of Simon's birth. It was then, she recalls, that she began writing fiction, waiting for her husband Don, a political reporter, to come home. "I started a historical novel, a romance novel, a Jewish novel although I am only a little bit Jewish, some straight novels. A publisher rejected my comedy-of-manners novel with a nice note saying, 'Do you have any more?' So I gave him my first mystery novel, featuring Wexford and Burden, had it accepted and rewrote...