Word: fictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least that's the way the story came to me in William Maxwell's novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. It was one of several works of fiction I read on a week's vacation in a place where the newspaper arrived a day late and never before 9 a.m. I am an early riser, so the first two or three hours of my vacation mornings were spent getting the news from the likes of Maxwell, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, Alice Adams, Stewart O'Nan, Charles Baxter--short stories and novels--and from Mary Karr...
...begin the day with fiction instead of the news had a transforming effect on the news. When 9 o'clock came, force of habit drew me to the shop where the papers arrive, and for the time it took to read them, I would lay aside, say, Wolff's The Rich Brother, a brooding short story about two brothers joined by fear and hatred, or O'Nan's novel The Names of the Dead, about a man who cannot leave the Vietnam War behind...
What a difference a decade makes. Mediagenic writers like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s. But those authors have now faded into their own material, symbols of the superficialities they exploited in their fiction...
...explanation is that literature is no more immune to changing fashions than any other form of entertainment. Novels that reflect only the glittering moment usually turn out to be artifacts, not art. Another reason is that literary fiction of the past two decades, good at dramatizing personal crises, has rarely attempted to engage the tumult of the wider world. Social disorder is handled more efficiently in nonfiction, journalism or seductively moving images. Who needs to plow through an imaginative verbal construct when the content is available in more accessible forms...
...spare time, Park enjoys reading science fiction and caring for her three cats, according to her biography