Word: knopf
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...Garcia Marquez did not have to bend them much. The Nobel-prizewinning Colombian novelist has always maintained that he was not a magic realist but just a writer making the most of the lavish realities of Latin America. After reading his abundant new memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf; 484 pages), you'll be inclined to agree. In a warm but largely matter-of-fact style, he recalls the headless man who rode past one day on a donkey, killed by a machete in a settling of accounts on the nearby banana plantation. Then there was the fishing town...
...most other recent novels about a young woman's epiphanies--Ron Hansen's stately Mariette in Ecstasy, Mark Salzman's piercing Lying Awake--the story turns upon the riddle of where revelation ends and delusion begins. Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest (Knopf; 323 pages) leaves such questions and the purity and mystery of Ann's sightings largely intact. Instead the author concentrates on how her clear, white vision refracts into a rainbow of reflections, few of them exalted. His book is, in effect, a group of portraits of beat-up, lived-in lives that amounts to a group...
...Jones' magisterial The Known World is the favorite to sweep a weak field.) Which reminds us that there are only two living Americans who own a Nobel Prize for Literature. One is Saul Bellow, and the other is Toni Morrison, whose first novel in five years is called Love (Knopf; 202 pages). With a title like that, you'd better have a big hunk of Swedish gold in your pocket to back...
...budget deficits. A hellzapoppin' gubernatorial recall. What other misfortune could happen to California? Well, Joan Didion, who was born and raised there, could write an elegantly acerbic book arguing that the sustaining myths by which the state defines itself are false, self-deluding and corrupt. Where I Was From (Knopf; 226 pages) is that book, and Governor-elect Schwarzenegger, for one, can give thanks that it was written too soon to include...
...Haygood chases after him in a new biography, In Black and White (Knopf; 516 pages). Oddly, it's one of two published this month--the other is Gary Fishgall's Gonna Do Great Things (Scribner; 448 pages)--but it would take at least a dozen volumes to capture a life that encompassed tapping with Bojangles and making Cannonball Run with Jackie Chan. Haygood's book is the more interesting of the two, mostly because it's less sympathetic. Davis was a man who would do anything to be liked, and that's a mistake Haygood wisely avoids...