Word: netherworlds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also brings us Thomas C. Foster on How to Read Novels Like a Professor (Harper; 304 pages) and John Mullan on How Novels Work (Oxford; 346 pages), though Wood, as a book critic for the New Yorker, is the heavyweight of the field. These books fall into the curious netherworld of extra-academic literary theory. They are the last, depleted descendants of what used to be called aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that theorized the human response to works of art. For most intents and purposes, aesthetics collapsed in 1970 under the weight of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. What...
...Nonami, 47, is the latest in a small group of tremendously popular contemporary female Japanese mystery writers to be translated into English. Their lurid fiction is anchored in ostensibly mundane domestic affairs - far cries from the hard-boiled yakuza netherworld of conventional Japanese crime fiction, where women mostly inhabit peripheral positions as prostitutes or femmes fatales. Like Natsuo Kirino, whose best-selling 1997 novel Out chronicles a band of disaffected middle-aged bento-box factory workers who moonlight as murderesses, Nonami places women at the center of her work. As the author of some 50 books, she is more prolific...
...successor and lifelong Corleone paesano, are both serving life terms in Italy. They were allegedly about to rebuild their "Old Bridge" between America and Sicily, reestablishing the business and drug trafficking ties between the Sicilian and American mobs. For a while, that relationship had been paramount in the netherworld as the Gambinos reigned supreme in the 1970s and 1980s. Arriving in the early '80s, the exiled Inzerillos were content to lie low under the protection of their powerful relatives. But the Gambino era would not last for long. In the mid-80s, 22 Sicily-born defendants were tried...
...from Homer to Boccaccio to fellow French writers like Dumas and Molière - not have been familiar with Baudelaire's 19th century writings about drugs, hashish in particular? One can only speculate that De Monfreid's feigned innocence is a raconteur's device, making his descent into the netherworld of drug smuggling all the more delicious because it is happening to a drug...
...newspapers and on radio and TV. But the cover picture of a lone firefighter kneeling to check a fire-hose connection against the background of a tree erupting in a ball of flame summed up Californians' frustration and helplessness. The Dantesque orange glow bathing the entire scene imparted a netherworld aura to the image and gave me the uncomfortable feeling that there was no escape. I was arrested by a stark sense of the anguish and loss that those fires caused but even more by the primal insecurities that are aroused whenever we confront such unpredictability in nature. That...