Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This scenario, which sounds a bit like science fiction to most Americans, is already accepted as fact by the motor moguls in Detroit, where a remarkable technological transformation is occurring. Gone are the days when that city's machines were regarded as handsome and powerful but basically dumb brutes. Today the buzz words in the Motor City are "smart cars," vehicles that literally think for themselves, diagnose their own problems and compensate for their drivers' frailties and failures, while ensuring a safer, more comfortable ride. A few smart-car features are already available on higher-priced vehicles, and Detroit intends...
BRITISH NOVELIST WILLIAM BOYD will never be accused of taking the safe route. His new novel, The Blue Afternoon (Knopf; 373 pages; $23), is for the most part a superior piece of fiction with unusual, mostly immoral characters, plenty of suspense and a truly ghoulish surprise. Unfortunately, that story, set in Manila in 1902, doesn't begin until page...
...early summer in a nameless Connecticut hamlet, and the Irises are wilting. Like the members of so many families who inhabit the world of contemporary fiction, those in the Iris clan are profoundly disconnected from one another. When we meet them in Angel Angel (Viking; 211 pages; $19.95), April Stevens' intelligent and moving first novel, they seem withered by their inability to achieve the closeness they yearn...
Katy Gibb is one of the better comic creations to come along in recent fiction, a moody, slovenly girl whose main weapon in life's wars is a brazen will. Bland, a decent soul at sea without his job, never does learn how she found out that the apartment across the hall from his was vacant during the tenants' vacation. She makes it her squat and him her quarry. Her national origin is never clear, nor does her array of vowel sounds provide much of a hint. But her spiritual roots are in California. She claims to be adept...
Franked has vivid memories of his undergraduate days at Harvard. A government concentrator, he wrote his thesis on the fiction of the Vietnam War with Professor StanleIy Hoffmann. Frankel's interest in screen-plays began when he studied playwriting and took film-making courses at MIT. "By junior year I was pretty committed to ending up in Hollywood. I wrote movie reviews for the Crimson. I lived in Mather house, but, as you know, you end up living at the Crimson...