Word: mr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...average lonely heart, Bobby Fischer?erstwhile chess champion, virulent anti-Semite, and fugitive from the U.S. justice system?might not sound like Mr. Right. But to hear Miyoko Watai tell it, he's a dreamboat. Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo last week, Watai gushed: "I think of Bobby as a king and I would like to become queen." The 59-year-old acting head of the Japan Chess Association said turbulent circumstances had forced her to reveal what she had previously preferred to keep private?that she and Fischer have been living together in Tokyo for the past...
...MR. CLEAN SAMSUNG | SOUTH KOREA...
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in an alternative version of early 19th century England, one in which magic is real but on the wane, to the point that there are only two practicing sorcerers left in England. The pair are a pleasing study in contrasts: Mr. Norrell is exceptionally learned but shy and fussy. "He is," a character remarks, "at one and the same time, the most remarkable man of the age and the most tedious." Strange is charming, young, fashionable and romantic. Clarke could have called the book Sense and Sensibility if the title weren't already taken...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...
Clarke has another rare faculty: she can depict evil. Much of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell takes place in the shadow of a powerful and fascinatingly cruel fairy who makes Voldemort look like a Muppet. This is not kid friendly, although precocious kids may go for it. Clarke reaches down into fantasy's deep, dark, twisted roots, down into medieval history and the scary, Freudian fairy-tale stuff. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell reminds us that there's a reason fantasy endures: it's the language of our dreams. And our nightmares...