Word: mailer
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...founded Antaeus, a superb quarterly; his publications include novels (The Sheltering Sky. Let It Come Down), collections of poetry and short stories, travel essays, oral histories translated from the North African Moghrebi dialect and an autobiography. His work has been highly esteemed by other writers, including a few (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal) with no love for each other. Yet Bowles remains less familiar to general readers than dozens of his inferiors...
Another word for it is nihilistic. It was brilliant to assign Norman Mailer to cover the 1964 political conventions; it was sick to have 1968 covered by the French Playwright Jean Genet, Novelist William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. That same nihilistic strain infected the magazine's outworn Dubious Achievement Awards, apparently meant for readers of Mad magazine who had aged but not grown...
Complaint: Speaks of overwork, loss of confidence and inability to get provable results. Hears conflicting inner voices and insists that former friends are laughing behind his back. Patient agrees with Norman Mailer: "It's hard to get to the top in America, but it's even harder to stay there...
...spasmodic myth has it that writing is like prizefighting. Contemporary subscribers to the pugilistic analogy include Norman Mailer, a few markedly inferior knuckle-typers and the odd belligerent who would rather fight than think. If this macho conceit helps anyone get through the night or his work, fine. But the sport that most truly engages American writers was, is and probably will always be baseball. This anthology of 27 pieces of baseball fiction, the first such collection in 30 years, demonstrates the affinity and raises a question: Why have so many authors felt the urge to make up stories about...
...these passages, unfortunately, the polemical quality comes through more clearly than the analysis. Her treatments of such diverse authors as Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and James Baldwin make sense from the point of view of her thesis, but are not always clear in their own right. Her discussions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's and Eugene Genovese's portrayals of black sociology are vivid but sometimes confusingly located in the text, and her autobiographical comments, while giving life to the argument, do not always flow happily into the generalizations she attempts to make...