Word: fictions
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...critical reception of John le Carre's first work of fiction was mixed and typically British: he was flogged. "When I was about 10 or 11," he recalls, "I wrote a story about a jockey who loaded his whip with lead and beat the horse to run faster. The headmaster had a secretary who took me under her wing, and she agreed to type the story out because I thought it should be immortalized. And the headmaster discovered that I was giving work to his secretary and flogged me for it. He had a riding crop, and it made...
...that doesn't stop him from treating her roughly, and her tale is in the end bittersweet at best. He delivers it in a bluff, plainspoken style; one flaw in the telling is that the dialogue has a touch of that musty quality that often inhabits historical fiction. Yet Grunwald has a strong sense of his historical period--he genuinely intuits the mirror logic of the Renaissance religious mind--and his story has an emotional power that transcends it. In the present day, Grunwald asks, "Do we not still look for miracles, saints and devils, if, perhaps, by other names...
...axiomatic that good journalists make lousy novelists. When they turn their writerly talents toward fiction, most reporters?particularly foreign correspondents?are undermined by the very expertise that lends authority to their dispatches. Rather than creating flesh-and-blood characters, they often produce stick figures representing various factions and points of view, who hold forth in preachy, predictable allegories. Yet in The Spice Garden, his debut novel, Michael Vatikiotis, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, has constructed an engrossing narrative of mass hysteria and mob violence set in the Maluku archipelago, Indonesia's spice islands, during the horrific bloodbath that...
...well rendered and has the ring of truth. Vatikiotis' writing style is polished and evocative, despite occasional patches of purple that could have been pruned. The novel's Romeo-and-Juliet subplot is sugary and painfully predictable, with lovemaking scenes that the judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award could take under consideration...
...that depends on your definition of shit. In the 60s and 70s, much New Yorker fiction had a sere, affectless style - embodied (or disembodied) by the stories of Donald Barthelme - that spoke to a narrow band of Manhattan intelligentsia. Playboy spread its net to include all forms of fiction, from Styron and Ken Kesey to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. Further, The New Yorker could intimidate readers into accepting its crabby tone, because the magazine knew best; it really was written for a certain kind of New Yorker. Playboy had to sell each story...