Word: friedman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...times. They are rogue talents, unpredictable, disturbing and powerfully individual. Thus they form no cohesive school or even a wave. Nonetheless, critics of late have taken to calling them "black humorists," which is probably as good a tag as any. Among them are such comic writers as Bruce Jay Friedman and Joseph Heller, both of whose first novels were bestsellers. They also include such gifted but less widely read novelists as John Barth and James Purdy; they are perhaps best known for names like Terry Southern, Warren Miller and J. P. Donleavy...
Though racial prejudice is not one of the easiest table-pounding topics to laugh at, Bruce Jay Friedman made it appallingly funny two years ago in his memorable first novel, Stern. The book's pathetic hero is a middle-class urban Jew with round shoulders and "pale spreading hips," who moves his sexy wife and lonely child out to the suburbs...
There Stern finds himself pitted against just about everything, from his do-it-yourself bumbling to the anti-Semite neighbor who knocks down his wife and calls his son a "kike". Author Friedman lets fact blend with fantasy to make Stern at once laughable and very sad both real and wry. Friedman, 34, has a promising talent if it doesn't get trapped by too much sameness of subject. His recent second novel, A Mother's Kisses (TIME, Sept. 4), a caricature of the child-devouring Yiddisher Mama, was funnier than Stern, but a good bit safer...
...Crimson Key Society announced the election of new officers for 1965 last night. They are: William G. Lee '66, president: Charles E. Flenning '66, vice-president; Dudley H. Ladd '66 secretary; Benjamin M. Friedman '66, treasurer; Paul N. Fredlund '66, Orientation Committee chairman; R. Wald Shelton Jr. '67, schools chairman: Vanghn C. Williams '66, guides chairman; and Geoffrey B. Shields '67, athletic chairman...
...justice to the script, although I once more wanted more speaking and less action. The red lights of the climax in Rex were replaced by the shattering booms of Zeus' thunder; even Laura Esterman as Ismene, with emotion shivering in every syllable, was drowned out by the noise. Friedman as Creon again, Richard Backus as Theseus, and David Blocker, who replaced a less talented Lorenzo Weisman of Rex as the leader of the Colonus chorus, supplied that immeasurably graceful skill of speech which brought me back from the visual, just as I had wanted...