Word: hacking
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Religious Black Market. In their speculative notes on the unknown author, the editors of Encounter compare "Abram Tertz'' with Ilya Ehrenburg-in-exile, the scoffer who could write The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (TIME, Aug. 22) before he turned party hack. It would not be the oddest thing about this strange and wonderful book if it turned out that Ehrenburg was in fact "Abram Tertz." Perhaps only the "psychoscope," a plug-in device invented by the secret policemen Tolya and Vitya to trace the private thoughts of citizens, will ever know the truth...
...curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip's and antiquarian's interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass. Marquand was never satisfied with the effort. Now, 35 years later, Timothy Dexter Revisited gives a curious old codger...
...bookseller's hack is not a new figure in literature, as I am sure you are aware. And many notable men have played the role. Oliver Goldsmith wrote a book about birds, full of astounding nonsense, for a London bookseller, and Charles Dickens produced a lamentable Child's History of England. Both works were undertaken for the same reason -the gentlemen needed money, a chronic need among 90% of authors, then...
Love & Flowers. By 1928 Mayakovsky was disillusioned enough to write The Bedbug, a satire of Communist society so pointed that even the dullest party hack was set to squirming. His villain is Prisypkin, a smug, card-carrying, vulgar proletarian who typifies the new Soviet man Prisypkin is stored in a freezer, and by 1978, in the last half of the play. Russian life has become so dehumanized that love tobacco, vodka, even flowers have become half-forgotten matters of history. Poor Prisypkin is now restored, and because of his simple humanity, he quickly becomes a curiosity. He asks for books...
...Most books thought up by publishers or moviemakers and farmed out to authors. Irving Wallace's The Chapman Report, old publishing hands insist, was hatched by Victor Weybright of the New American Library and reads like the hack job it is. Rona Jaffe's soap-slick The Best of Everything was written to the specifications of Film Producer Jerry Wald. It is possible to write a non-novel without any lightning from Olympus; Henry Morton Robinson accomplished it this year with Water of Life, a book he thought up all by himself as a cynical imitation of Taylor...