Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...imminence of Underworld has been talked and written about for months. By now nearly everyone who cares about contemporary literary fiction has heard how DeLillo got the inspiration for the novel. Intrigued by the hubbub back in 1991 surrounding the 40th anniversary of Ralph Branca's fateful pitch and Bobby Thomson's subsequent home run--the so-called shot heard 'round the world that gave the New York Giants a playoff victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers and the National League championship--DeLillo went to the library and looked up on microfilm the front page of the New York Times...
...Putnam; 219 pages; $23.95) is a salvage job, a reprocessing of what the author calls the "best parts" of an unpublished novel that did not work. This revision is a mix of autobiographical bits, plot concepts, barbershop cynicism and romantic idealism, all loosely tied together by a standard science-fiction device: on Feb. 13, 2001, a quirk in space-time flips the calendar back 10 years to Feb. 17, 1991. From that moment, everyone in the world is fated to repeat the decade in every living detail...
Without a driving story, Timequake depends entirely on the author's familiar tone of weary bemusement, at times attributed to Kilgore Trout, the fictional writer who has been Vonnegut's unaltered ego in previous novels. The connection between fiction and fact is readily apparent. Trout spends the rerun rewriting My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot. Vonnegut, who took nearly a decade to complete his aborted book, works through that same material again...
DIED. JUDITH MERRIL, 74, science-fiction dame of peerless anthologies and foreboding novels such as Shadow on the Hearth; of heart failure; in Toronto. One of the first female S-F writers, Merril voiced new--but still bleak--concerns, writing, for example, about a mother's love for her severely deformed baby...
Gates was expected to teach African-American Studies 137z: "Black Women and their Fiction," this semester, according to last year's course catalogue. That course will instead be offered in the 1999-2000 academic year...