Word: islanded
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Like last year's winner, Doris Lessing, Le Clézio has strong ties to Africa - he was born in Nice in 1940, but his family history on both sides leads back to Mauritius, an island about 500 miles east of Madagascar that has been best known in the West, at least until now, as the home of the famously extinct dodo. The son of a doctor, Le Clézio grew up in France and Nigeria speaking French and English. He began writing at the age of 8 - one of his childhood efforts, composed on a long voyage...
...story is semiautobiographical. Guo grew up in a small village on an island off south China's coast, and went to Beijing at around the same age as her character Fenfang. She churned out novels to support herself while in film school. In 2002, she left Beijing for London, where she continued her film studies and began writing A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a humorous novel about her struggles with the English language and a British paramour. An expired visa forced her to return to Beijing, where she put the novel on hold and made Concrete Revolution...
...Fortunately for the Elis, sloppy football is okay when you’re playing Dartmouth. I won’t go as far to call the Big Green awful, because the last time I wrote that about a team Rhode Island destroyed Brown 37-13, but Dartmouth is a really not very good football team...
There is order emerging from the chaos. Randalls supermarket and its in-house Starbucks is open, but with the island water and sewer system still not functioning, portable toilets have been lined up outside. Dozens of moldy, battered refrigerators ripped out of the low-rise seaside condos are corralled on street corners. Stacks of new drywall stand outside. Just two blocks from the beach, a tall wire fence has been erected around the gas pumps and doorway of Luke's Supermarket and Deli, a 50-year island institution where West Enders could sit out front and munch on barbecue...
...more than 6,000 island residents perished in a hurricane. Many of the dead were taken out to sea for burial but even though their bodies were weighted down the tides brought them back. For over a month there were mass funeral pyres around the city. There will be no burning on the island this time. Fires are forbidden. There is a dusk-to-dawn curfew and residents are warned to get shots for tetanus and hepatitis before returning. Downtown, with its brick and ironwork Victorian-era buildings - once dubbed the "Wall Street of the Southwest" - is a ghost town...