Word: fictions
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...potential yawn inducer, and Peter Ackroyd decidedly belongs in the second category. The author of biographies of T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens and of seven earlier novels, including The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Ackroyd has moved skillfully and often between the provinces of fact and fiction, with particular attention paid to the muzzy, fuzzy border between the two. By the time the historical Marx and Gissing and the imagined Cree sit together in silence in the Reading Room, the books they choose not only define their characters but also contain hints and echoes of a larger story...
What this introductory execution has to do with the Limehouse murders is, essentially, the question and plot of the novel. Unfortunately, this malange of fiction and fact is longer on intellectual pleasures than emotional resonance. Ackroyd has Dickensian ambitions and tries to show a city full of interlocking coincidences leading inexorably to tragedy. He does so with considerable skill but untimely haste. The intricacies of his plot seem ultimately to trace vectors rather than lives...
...heroes rarely possess. In the last 10 years, he should have developed into an actor of moresurprising dimensions. But bad choices like "Blind Date" and "Hudson Hawk" brought him quickly back to earth. Now he is having a kind of resurgence, sparked first by his excellent performance in "Pulp Fiction," and blown into flame by the greatness of "Die Hard With a Vengeance...
Samual L. Jackson, Willis "Pulp Fiction" co-star, fills Vel-Johnson's empty partner slot as Zeus, a former cab driver, current Harlem store-owner and hater of thieves drug-dealers, and white people. After saving McClane's life early in the movie, Zeus comes along for the ride, helping McClane to solve the riddles and do the things that "Simon says." (The film-makers are careful to use every pun and nursery rhyme they can think of with the name Simon...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known as South America's William Faulkner with good reason. Both added new territory to the map of fiction. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is an imaginary county that contains nearly all one needs to know about the old South, the Lost Cause and the rise of the scalawag class. Garcia's Macondo is a conjured region of Colombia's Caribbean coast that holds the essence of Latin America's ruinous history. The power of these microcosmic worlds brought Nobel Prizes to both men and ensured their subsequent work the utmost attention...