Word: fictions
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...Maureen Dean, 40. The wife of Watergate Defendant John Dean is a stockbroker living in Beverly Hills (and John is an investment banker). She already has one book to her credit, 1975's "Mo": A Woman's View of Watergate, but insists that the new one is "totally fiction." A Woman Lost, due in July from former Senate Wives Abigail McCarthy and Jane Muskie, is a "suspense novel" involving the wife of a Vice President who is hospitalized against her will; hmm, would Martha Mitchell mind? This month will also mark the publication of Conglomerate, by former Congressional Spouse Rita...
DIED. Christopher Isherwood, 81, British-born author whose fiction and nonfiction blended his real experiences with imagined ones, most notably in Goodbye to Berlin, his 1939 short-story collection about expatriates in decadent pre-Nazi Germany, which was adapted as I Am a Camera, a 1951 play and 1955 movie, and Cabaret, a 1966 Broadway musical and 1972 movie; of cancer; in Santa Monica, Calif. Always a rebel, he went to Berlin in 1929 to sample its illicit pleasures, as well as to visit his lifelong friend and sometime lover, W. H. Auden. An immigrant...
...encounters further propelled Frayn away from asbestos sales and into an exemplary career as journalist, novelist and playwright. While still an undergraduate, he contributed to the premier humor magazine Punch. Straight out of school, he wrote news and columns for the Manchester Guardian and then the Observer. Turning to fiction, he produced five deft, whimsical novels centered on class conflicts and old school ties. In the past decade he has emerged as one of Britain's leading playwrights. His glimpse of backstage pandemonium, Noises Off, was a Broadway hit two seasons ago. Seven earlier scripts have been produced, most...
...novels is always in danger of trying the reader's patience. His repeated assertions that uncertainty is the only certainty are a bit modish, as is his belief that literature is not in the enlightening business, but should aim to create "disturbances." Nevertheless, Ford accomplishes the first requirement of fiction: the making of a convincing illusion. Frank Bascombe inhabits an all too believable dreamworld. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...Harlequins! are seen as works of a "garden-variety egotist." Both books have their share of self-indulgence and preening; neither approaches the level of masterpieces like Lolita and Pale Fire, the last word on the mad pursuit of biographical reality. But viewed against the body of Nabokov's fiction, the narcissist label seems inadequate, a bit trendy and more than a little disingenuous. Field made his name studying the work and the man. Better than most outsiders, he knows the sources of Nabokov's genius, his gifts for showmanship and parody, his eccentricities and vanities. To discover at this...