Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...books cover a wide range of subject including fiction, essays, literary criticism, drama and film...
...megayield critical and commercial success of The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987 made Tom Wolfe a rich and very gratified author indeed. That big, boisterous novel, his first, proved a point that he had been arguing, much to the annoyance of literary folks, for years: American fiction could still portray the hectic complexities of contemporary social life, could still capture the textures and rhythms of a seething modern city, if novelists would just leave their desks, maybe take a sabbatical from their professorships in creative writing and go out and report on the fabulous stuff taking place all around...
...money, status--rage in the New South as they do everywhere else; it just takes a little more digging to find them. Wolfe does, of course, but among all the animal appetites that are slaked or comically thwarted during the novel there appears one new to Wolfe's fiction. For all their affluence, or their pained lack of same, his chief characters hunger for a code of conduct or a framework of beliefs that will make sense of their lives right now, a blink before the millennium. At its heart, A Man in Full is a cliff-hanging morality tale...
...hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction? Who else would have set a scene, the most over-the-top in the whole novel, in the breeding barn at Turpmtine, where Charlie, in a misguided attempt to impress his guests from Atlanta, makes them, male and female alike, witness a tumultuous mating between one of his stallions...
Being right--accurate--has been important to Wolfe since his earliest days as a New Journalist, when he wrote feature stories so vividly, employing such a wide array of techniques borrowed from fiction that some readers didn't believe they could be true. Jann Wenner, founder, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, opened his magazine's pages to early versions of The Right Stuff, Bonfire and A Man in Full, and is a Wolfe friend and fan. "Many years ago, he used to get knocked for making stuff up," Wenner says. "But in my experience with him, which...