Word: fictions
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...passengers have been infected with a palpable vision of someone they have loved and lost. Waking to find a perfect facsimile of his late wife (Natascha McElhone), Kelvin soon surrenders to what seems like a gift from the grave. Steven Soderbergh's remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction classic, based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, can't touch the 1972 film's austere poignancy, and McElhone lacks the bewitching beauty of Natalya Bondarchuk in the original Solaris. But the project's gravity and ambition can't be denied. They inform Clooney's gently grieving demeanor, the ache...
...past quarter-century of American popular culture was ruled by the great mega-franchises of science fiction--Star Wars, Star Trek, Independence Day, The Matrix. But lately, since the turn of the millennium or so, we've been dreaming very different dreams. The stuff of those dreams is fantasy--swords and sorcerers, knights and ladies, magic and unicorns. In 2001 the fantasy double bill of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings ranked first and second at the box office, and it's happening all over again this year. In its first weekend alone, Harry Potter and the Chamber...
Alone yes, but as he also shows, always with another consciousness. What good fiction fosters is not self-absorbed isolation but isolation as the first step toward engaging the mind of the writer or his characters. So the keystone of this book is "Why Bother?", a revised and retitled version of a now famous essay that Franzen published six years ago in Harper's magazine. He tries to define a purpose for himself as a novelist in a society in which "the rising waters of electronic culture have made each reader and each writer an island." He finds in fiction...
...story?which she characterizes as the real memoirs of a geisha. Golden's glimpse into the mysterious geisha world delighted readers and was bought by Hollywood for big bucks. (At one point, Steven Spielberg planned to direct the film version.) But that book?despite the "memoirs of" moniker?was fiction. Geisha, a Life, written by Iwasaki with Rande Brown, is supposed to be all that Golden's book wasn't: the geisha's life story, straight from her mouth...
...spacious flat on the Isle of Wight. Frances (Smith), a specialist in the provenance of artworks, gets a visit from Madeleine (Dench), a novelist who's decided to write a non-fiction book - we don't yet know if it will be a true one - about her late marriage. Ex-hubby is off to Seattle with an American thing, and Madeleine has come to do research, to dig the dirt and possibly bury her old rival in it. At first the two have nothing in common but the familiar British condescension toward Americans. ( "Because they're richer than everybody else...