Word: midwesternizing
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Megabus This U.S. version of a popular British bus line models itself after low-fare airlines, with colorful vehicles and hip styling. Eight Midwestern cities are linked to its Chicago hub with ticket prices as low as $1. More typical fares are $5 to Milwaukee, Wis., and $20 to St. Louis...
Bird watching isn't actually Franzen's main gig. You probably know him as the author of the huge 2001 best seller The Corrections, a symphony of Midwestern, middle-class mental suffering that conveys depression and anxiety more entertainingly and eloquently than almost any book I've ever read, and which almost instantly made him the premier literary novelist in his age bracket. You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come...
...last August, but there are still boxes on the floor. So far, you would never know that you were visiting the home of the Faulkner of awkwardness. Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was the sleeper hit of 2005. It tells the bittersweet, perfectly observed story of Lee, a quiet Midwestern girl who tries, with decidedly mixed results, to fit in at a breathtakingly preppy Eastern private school. To the surprise of many, not least its publisher and its author, Prep spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Barely 1 1/2 years later, Sittenfeld...
...real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with heavy irony," notes Lethem. "Now, a lot of writing has a very natural degree of engagement with the vernacular culture." Look at someone like Sittenfeld, whose Prep, a wildly readable account of a Midwestern girl floundering at an élite Eastern boarding school, became a surprise best seller. Is she a literary writer or a commercial writer? The distinction no longer seems to apply. She's just a good writer...
...heroic scenario: the explosion of the doomed planet Krypton, the miraculous escape of the infant son of a Kryptonian scientist, the discovery of the baby's spaceship by an elderly couple near the Midwestern town of Smallville. And the gradual revelations of the child's superhuman strength, the foster parents' exhortation that he "must use it to assist humanity," the youth's adoption of a dual identity--the mild-mannered, blue-suited newspaper reporter, Clark Kent, and the red-caped, blue-haired Superman, the man of steel ... [He] is a figure who somehow manages to embody the best qualities...