Word: fictions
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...fiction works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 265 pages), James Wood tells a story from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, a novel that since its publication in 1932 has probably been read by only two people, namely James Wood and Joseph Roth. A military officer visits his servant, who is on his deathbed. When the officer enters, the old servant tries to click his heels together, even though he is under the covers and his feet are bare. It's a moment of deep, lancing pathos, when you seem to take in both characters' entire lives for an instant...
Lawyers have been best-selling novelists, and doctors and even architects. But you don't find many tech guys dominating the fiction best-seller's list. Even David Wroblewski, author of what's shaping up to be the sleeper hit of the summer, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and a veteran computer programmer, can't name any. "I'm a little surprised that it's so hard to think of at least one other example," he says, noting that the impulse to write fiction is hardly uncommon among people used to writing in code. "I've run into lots...
...reasons that elude him to this day, Wroblewski says he got interested in fiction writing around 1990, and began taking creative-writing workshops. Gradually, he got the idea for Sawtelle and enrolled in an MFA program that allowed him to work, mainly, from his home in Colorado. Why pursue an MFA? Because he as an engineer, he was vexed by the structure of narrative fiction. He was especially interested in what he called "middle structure" - "at the bottom level of a novel are sentences and scenes and paragraphs," he says. "Tiny particles of the story. At the top level...
...Metropolis is acknowledged as one of the most important and influential works in the history of film. Its - for its era - avant-garde special effects and visual flourishes not only inspired some of the finest science fiction films of the 20th century, such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; the unique aesthetics of the film left its mark on numerous fields of popular culture, from comic books such as Superman to music videos by Madonna...
...silly--and miss the point. The novel is profoundly antislavery. Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction--a recognition that the slave had two personalities, "the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father...