Word: lurid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From this simple arrangement Mr. Bowles seeks to establish the lack of moral and social authors which permits the tides of life to push us all about one way or another. But the lurid quality of Kit's refuge in the "friendly carnal presence" of the nearest male makes the jump from the naturalistic to the symbolic level difficult...
When Author Paul Bowles finishes with them in The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, Port has slipped through his zero into death by typhoid, and Kit's zero has become a noose plaited from strands of nymphomania and insanity. All this may be taken straight as simply a lurid, supersexy Sahara adventure story completely outfitted with camel trains, handsome Arabs, French officers and a harem. Nonetheless, The Sheltering Sky is a remarkable job of writing, with a craftsmanship that makes it the most interesting first novel to come from a U.S. writer this year...
Bandit Jesse James was one of the pink-paper Gazette's well-known subscribers until his death in 1882 (duly noted in the Gazette), but sedate family men also ate up the weekly's authoritative sport news and lurid stories of "horrid murders, outrageous robberies . . . vulgar seductions," under such titillating or shocking headlines as SNARED BY A SCOUNDREL. AN INNOCENT COUNTRY BEAUTY or ROAST MAN (on a hotel fire). Promotion-wise Publisher Fox sponsored John L. Sullivan's bare-knuckled heavyweight bouts of the '80s, also gave championship belts and medals to rat catchers, oyster openers...
...Harvard man, and were soon living in luxury at the Consulate. They were taken on guided tours of the city, and after a pleasant stay, they got a free flight back to Tri-zone in an empty air-lift transport. Another Harvard undergraduate with a flair for the lurid spent a weekend with the Salvador Dalis in Spain...
...carryings-on centering around Mrs. Kirby's boardinghouse on West Chestnut Street, where 18-year-old Elliot Paul lived for seven months in 1909, are as lurid and complex as the plot of a Faulkner novel, and though they are reported as unembellished fact, considerably less convincing. Scattered among accounts of excursions to local bars and bordellos, political picnics, Shriners conventions and early jazz sessions, are the tragedies of boardinghouse friends such as Donna Guillermina, a wandering Spanish aristocrat who died of eating too much burgoo at a political rally. Minor Paul characters are shot by suspicion-crazed alcoholic...