Word: morrison
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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They don't have much else in common, but Philip Roth, John Updike and Toni Morrison do resemble one another in at least one respect: their ages. Roth is 75 this year, Updike is 76, and Morrison is 77. (Roth and Updike are separated by exactly a year and a day.) Together these three are the ranking triumvirate of a literary generation that is way too all over the place to have a collective name--they ain't modernists, they ain't postmodernists--but that dominated American fiction for the second half of the 20th century. This year all three...
Roth, Updike and Morrison have new novels out this fall, and in each of them they return to a story they first told much earlier in their careers. In The Widows of Eastwick, out Oct. 21, Updike has dreamed up a sequel to his novel of suburban sorcery, The Witches of Eastwick. In Indignation, published in September, Roth retells the story of Portnoy's Complaint, the brilliant, pneumatically obscene book that made him famous. And in A Mercy, due out in November, Morrison--the last American writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature--tells the story of a mother...
...Morrison's vision has never been much in need of this kind of enlarging. Her work has always been epic in scope. In Beloved, Morrison told the story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the opposite--she puts her daughter Florens up for sale: "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale...
...most potent weapon in Ventura's triumph was his up-the-Establishment attitude, his platform quotations from such political thinkers as Jerry Garcia and Jim Morrison, his TV commercial showing him as an Action Figure doll doing battle with the Evil Special Interest Man. ("I don't want your stupid money," growls the Ventura doll.) Some may call it the Revenge of the Couch Potatoes, but Ventura's campaign galvanized younger Minnesotans. They swarmed to the polls to register and vote on Election Day--Minnesota law allows same-day registration--in such numbers that some polling places...
...secretary of the Academy, noted just recently that Europe is “the center of the literary world” and claimed that American writers are far too insular, brainwashed by their own cannibalizing pop culture to produce any literature worthy of the Nobel Prize. Not since Toni Morrison nabbed the honor in 1993, it seems, has an author from our shores been able to extricate him or herself from oppressive American groupthink in order to produce something worthy of such accolades...