Word: mordantly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...phrases are terse, the message mordant. It might also be credible if Singer had not just published Stories for Children, a collection of 36 works for the young, dating back to Zlateh the Goat in 1966. Without the original illustrations, his fictions stand revealed as something more than mere bedtime stories. Many are informed by Freudian insights; tale after tale demonstrates a strong desire to prod the audience-and in some small way retard or push forward the wheels of history...
...this has done nothing to discourage Novelist Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now). His 14th book, aptly subtitled My Canadian Album, is a mordant, witty brief for the defense of his homeland. As evidence, the Montreal native offers a series of diverse impressions of Canada's past imperfect and present tense. He lunches with Pierre Trudeau, and remembers an earlier Prime Minister, the gnomic William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "nightly for 22 years sat by his crystal ball, beneath an illuminated portrait of his mum, and rapped with her spirit, seeking guidance...
Both frolicsome and mordant, Fo's work is beginning to find American audiences. The Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., has undertaken one of his better-known leftist carnivals. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, written in 1970, is based on the actual case of an Italian anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli. Accused of terrorism, Pinelli is said to have jumped to his death from the fourth-floor window of Milan police headquarters. Fo suspected, and a later investigation proved, that Pinelli was pushed out the window by the police...
...that mortals can legitimately come to a glimpse of what lies on the other side. Thomas A. Edison said as he died in 1931, "It's very beautiful over there." (It is also possible, however, that he was referring to the view outside his window.) Voltaire had a mordant premonition. The lamp next to his deathbed flared momentarily, and his last words were "What? The flames already...
...novel-and very good. Not for him the extravagant mythmaking of his contemporary Salman Rushdie or the chilly experiments of Ian McEwan. Stylistically, Wilson is headed straight into the past, when a novelist told a suspenseful story and commanded his characters' souls. He can be flippant and overly mordant, but his lively wit and fine sense of morals and manners mark him, at 33, as a formidable novelist already...