Word: motherless
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...land between popular and literary fiction is fertile, but it can be perilous. Lethem is no stranger to it. He won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, which is basically a hard-boiled mystery retrofitted with great writing and highfalutin themes. Most of the stories in Men and Cartoons play in the nerdier realms of comic books and science fiction--one revolves around a mysterious aerosol spray that reveals lost belongings and lost lovers; another recounts the sad, seedy later life of a retired comic-book hero named Super Goat Man. But while Chabon builds...
...women are distinctly different. Each gender brings vitally important, and unique, elements to a child’s development. Saying that children don’t necessarily need fathers or mothers is saying that one gender or the other is unnecessary. A loving and compassionate society always aids motherless and fatherless families. Compassionate societies never intentionally create families without mothers or fathers, which is exactly what same-sex homes...
Lethem, whose previous novel Motherless Brooklyn was named the “Book of the Year” by Esquire, is very engaged in his characters. This was clearly evident at the reading; he eagerly mimicked the dull hulk of a schoolyard bully; he let the squeak of a scared submissive jump from his lips. Clad in tight jeans, a bright yellow shirt and Costello glasses, Lethem was as colorful as his characters themselves...
Lethem is one of those novelists who get better book by book, from his early science-fiction noodlings to the hard-boiled, atmospheric Motherless Brooklyn. The Fortress of Solitude is a glorious, chaotic, raw novel, and God knows there are any number of ways to pick it apart. Lethem has adopted a furiously literary, poetic style that would look overwrought in the pages of an undergraduate literary magazine, and he gambles on a risky element of magical realism: the boys discover a magic ring that intermittently (it's capricious) gives them superpowers. But Lethem grabs and captures 1970s New York...
...pressures of living an unstable, uncertain life. West connected the genre to “tragicomic” aspects of the musical movements which preceded it. Both spirituals and the blues were rooted in rootlessness—songs such as “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child” illuminated the feelings of slaves and former slaves in a strange new America. West cited jazz great Louis Armstrong and rapper Tupac Shakur as examples of this feeling of displacement in modern times. Armstrong wore a smile onstage, but he was racked with the knowledge that he could...