Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some people believe that humorous fiction in The New Yorker has long been legally dead of inanition. Fans of Garrison Keillor and Veronica Geng, two of the magazine's steadiest contributors of whimsy, will disagree. But the most hilarious refutations of this charge have come from Author Ian Frazier, 35, an alumnus of the Harvard Lampoon and a New Yorker staff writer whose stories began bouncing off the wall and into the magazine some ten years ago. These appearances have, to be sure, been infrequent and highly irregular. Dating Your Mom collects a decade's worth of funny business...
...accept responsibility for the creation of a narrative event--be it memories of masturbation or a teenager buying his first pair of pyjamas. When these infrequent reference points do emerge, they last only long enough for the reader to make a desperate grab at gaining understanding of Angelo's fiction before the memory fades or the reader--absorbed in the tales--chances upon a boy full of lead, upon more of the author's stylistic violence...
...plays with his words to create a state of intellectual torment in his readers to make them confront his country's predicament. His artistry lies not in an ability to write pleasant fiction, but in his powerful ability to use an inherited form in novel ways. Angelo's book offers no repose to its readers, no chance to lapse into a happy understanding with the text. One can only laugh and skim through the pages, as the narrator does at times, or wrestle with the book...
...Eliot and Mickey we find the familiar polar character types who, between them, have recently come to dominate serious fiction and film. Eliot struggles under the romantic illusion that absolute fulfillment can be our lot on this earth. He mistakes his fleeting moments of passion with Lee as promise of perfect happiness and in so doing threatens a good--and much more lasting--relationship. Mickey, the nihilist on the other extreme, erroneously concludes that because life ends it must therefore be meaningless...
...Sylvester Stallone as the one with courage, as the real hero, and those (now very wet) demonstrators as shams. Stallone was "Rocky", the vets were "chickens". I went on to the library through the rain, but at least one thing was clear--I knew how to score the evening: Fiction: 10. Reality: 0. Gillian Kendall