Word: fictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crowd. Some classic examples of his profound wisdom: "A is A," "Existence exists," "Freedom is the right for man to think" and--my favorite--"The good man lives, thinks, produces and respects others." He highlighted his otherwise vacuous talk with some select quotes from Rand's fiction and tossed in a few textbook points from Kant and Aquinas to make it all seem more legitimate, i.e. academic. Of course, the audience members, waving their well-thumbed copies of The Fountainhead, furiously shook their heads in hearty agreement...
First, objectivism has as many adherents as it does because Rand's fiction (We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) continues to influence high-school and college students, most of whom I suspect have had only a superficial exposure to philosophy. This privileges them to conclude rather wrongly that Ayn Rand is an original and deep thinker. Second, her books are accessible to the lay-reader while Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are not. Third, objectivism is sexy because it has appropriated the term "selfishness" to mean everything heroic...
...capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Mosley, the son of a black maintenance supervisor and a white Jewish mother, has, like Ellison, a nuanced appreciation for black-white relationships that goes beyond the stereotypes that mar much recent fiction by black authors. Gone Fishin', of course, is not in Invisible Man's league; few novels are. But it firmly establishes Mosley as a writer whose work transcends the thriller category and qualifies as serious literature. The big mystery is why any publisher would ever have turned it down...
...because they feared that a thriller about working-class African Americans would bomb at bookstores. Then along came Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. Settling in on the best-seller list for 43 weeks, her tale about four middle-class black women proved there was an audience for commercial fiction by black authors and sent publishers scrambling to find the next black blockbuster. Mosley's second manuscript, Devil in a Blue Dress, a continuation of the story he'd begun in Gone Fishin' and featuring the same hero, Easy Rawlins, was scooped up in the rush. The book received rave...
...November 27 editorial, "Demon's Humorless Antics," Justin C. Danilewitz faults a recent piece in Demon, written by Matthew A. Greenbaum '00, for its reference to "Schindler's List." Danilewitz writes that Greenbaum's fiction piece, which satirizes the Crimson Key Society at one point by showing the organization making jokes about "Schindler's List," is guilty of "question[ing]" the "tragedy" and "seriousness" of the Holocaust. Danilewitz goes so far as to say, "It is a sad testimonial to the legacy of our First Amendment that such material is considered to be imbued with enough expressive value...