Word: lits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most of the stories fit what people like to call the New Yorker pattern: sharp photographic action--glaringly-lit scenes into which the reader is lowered like a sound-stage camera on its boom, allowed to look on for a few minutes, and then abruptly lifted out again--terse dialogue and quick images. The people in the stories are finely brushed-in, and Miss Jackson knows how to use children to mirror the inadequacies of her adults. But these features are neither necessarily good in themselves nor Miss Jackson's particular property (though she works very well with them...
...exultant Communist radio described the scene of the crossing: "The river rang with silvery notes of bugles and martial music . . . Boats by the thousands shuttled between the northern and southern banks . . . As 1,000 guns belched fire and smoke, the Yangtze waters were lit up in a lurid glare...
...room. After the first expulsion, he reports solemnly, she sulked at him for a week. After the second, she would have nothing to do with him-until three weeks later she recognized him in the yard, 50 feet away from the beehouse, and lit on the finger which had fed her. Says Dr. Shafer: "I felt as if I had been forgiven...
...Sydney Greenstreet, with his lashless, inscrutable stare, is no whit different from what he has been in a dozen similar roles. As usual, he gets the dirtiest end of the dialogue. Sample, as Joan pulls a gun on him: "I should have spit you out the first time you lit between my teeth...
...touches on Hawthorne's writing, however, the book picks up interest at once. Of The Wives of the Dead, one of the most poignant stories in the English language, he says: "No reader of it will forget the speed with which its interior lights up and stays lit with a significance almost too delicate to name." Such stories do not date, for, as Van Doren says, they deal with timeless events, "and once Hawthorne is truly among them he is master of the simple matter they contain...