Word: fictions
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What can be said about modern American culture? A huge question, to be sure, but a lot of us seem to think that the best commentary will come in fictional form. Out of two of the fall season’s most eagerly anticipated novels, one has been marketed as its internationally-acclaimed author’s “American novel,” and the other has been frequently, almost carelessly, associated with that portentous label of “Great American Novel.” Salman Rushdie’s Fury is his first novel since...
...most popular single-country pavilions remained the German pavilion, a house reconstructed by Gregor Schneider that caused either great claustrophobia or great praise, and the Canadian pavilion (George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff), which took science fiction film making to the next level by using all five senses to play with the viewer’s sense of perception. The Polish pavilion (Leon Tarasewicz) won the cheap thrill award, by creating an easy optical illusion with their floor. (Ridges cut into the floor and painted orange on one side and blue on the other caused the floor to miraculously change...
...that Franzen might prove himself to be a successor to the likes of DeLillo and Pynchon. But another reason that people are paying so much attention to Franzen’s newest novel is the 1996 Harper’s piece in which he lamented the state of American fiction and argued that the way to save the American novel from irrelevancy was to connect “the personal and the social,” to write about the lives of individual characters while also saying something compelling and honest about their (and our) larger world...
...Larry King interviewed Bradley Whitford for a show about the presidency. It took me a while to figure out why an actor was being questioned about the responsibilities of the president until I realized that Whitford plays a White House staffer on a television show about the presidency. Apparently, fiction and reality have now merged...
...long ruled by a semi-fascist dictator like Peron, intensely conservative in its cultural orientation, have in common with a long-running, more or less liberal democracy like Venezuela's? In the real world there is no unified entity called South America. What this show presents is not some fiction of a general cultural ethos but rather the work of a number of talents underknown by norteamericanos, some of whom have some things in common...