Word: length
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Zuckerman Bound offers the convenience of all three novels in one volume and something else besides. Roth has added a novella-length epilogue to Nathan's saga called The Prague Orgy. For reasons he does not fully understand, a ( rejuvenated Zuckerman finds himself in Czechoslovakia, trying to obtain a manuscript of Yiddish stories, written by someone both unknown and deceased, to take back with him to the U.S. The writers and artists he meets in Prague have all been silenced and repressed by the government. Sex is their outlet and anodyne. Zuckerman wants to discuss literature; his hosts want...
...seems calculated or artificial. The Mist begins: "This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen." The novella-length story is an exercise in escalating gruesomeness, and the urgency and awkwardness of the narrative lend credence to the preposterous. So does the setting, a supermarket where a random bunch of shoppers have been trapped by what may be the end of the world. Familiar brand names anchor the incredible...
Despite Liszt's formidable reputation, the Faust Symphony, based on Goethe's poem, has never really entered the repertoire. Its high quotient of bombast, so attractive to the romantics, has fallen out of favor today, and its length (more than 70 minutes) can seem excessive. Still, Liszt's symphony, whose three movements depict Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, ought to rate high, not only for its often startling pictorialism, but for its technical skill as well. Conlon and his forces give it a vibrant reading...
...time dawn came and the murderous storm had headed farther north, the afflicted area was stripped clean. Thatched huts and small shops, animals and people had been swept beneath the waves; thousands of fishing boats had vanished. Whole settlements had been swamped or washed into the sea. Across the length and breadth of Urirchar there hung an eerie silence, broken now and then by the wails of survivors. Only a few houses remained, among them the Forestry Department building. Of some 10,000 residents of the islet, mostly peasant farmers and a few shopkeepers, up to 7,000 were dead...
...book's great length and leisurely pace convey the sense of a bygone era, while the author's attachment to misfits and backwaters never goes out of style. Neither does his premise: two aging gunfighters give it one more shot. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are descended from the noble buddy system of American literature. Exotically paired males, like Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, fling themselves at the wilderness and sooner or later paddle into the mainstream. McCrae and Call join the mythic flow by stealing a herd of Mexican cattle and driving them from...