Word: fictions
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This past year the National Book Award celebrated its 60th anniversary by conducting a public poll to select the best work of fiction that had won the award. To make the short list for this poll, the National Book Foundation balloted a number of select writers to pick their three favorite winners. Interestingly, four out the six books chosen were short story collections—the collected stories of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and John Cheever respectively. Only two were novels—Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity?...
...writer better exemplifies the importance of the unspoken than Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor’s fiction features the recurring Catholic themes of the fallen nature of man, grotesque humanity, and violent salvation. Many of her stories climax with a confrontation between two archetypal characters. One is often an entitled southern lady with a superior attitude, while the other figure is typically of a lower-class, seemingly ignorant or naïve. The tension gradually builds throughout the story until it is released when the working-class character suddenly attacks or humiliates his privileged counterpart...
...particular strengths of O’Connor’s writing are perfectly fitted to the form of the short story, which becomes increasingly apparent by comparing her short fiction with her novel “Wise Blood.” The novel follows the many disturbing encounters of the sardonic prophet Hazel Motes, who preaches the idea of the “Church Without Christ” while wandering through the South. Accordingly, the novel seems to be a series of stories strung together, but the incidents and violence lose their sting when compiled on top of each other...
...tell people the basic gist of the plot, and they say, ‘Oh, it’s fiction,’” said Schama. “And I say, ‘No, no it’s written like narrative history, and it’s kind of like biography, but it reads like a novel...
...Well, we don’t live life privy to all the expository information that we might wish to have. When we see fiction, we are not given that information either. Fiction films simulate life as it’s lived through acting and plot. Documentary claims not to be fiction and to therefore privilege human existence. The paradox is, it almost entirely consists of people after the fact telling you about their lives. If you asked me about my life, I would just lie through my teeth. Our aesthetic aspiration was about ambiguity, not about clarity. We didn?...