Word: novel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reading book," says the author, is "what we all want these days ... a book in which we can lose ourselves . . ." If this is all everybody wants, his new novel provides a decent degree of immersion. The story of a wagon journey across Pennsylvania in 1764, Toward the Morning moves with all the jingle and creak and rich, contemplative leisure of a horse-drawn cavalcade in open country. The reader has all the time in the world to take in everything, and the author gives him everything...
...publishers read Dublin-born Anne Crone's first novel and turned it down cold. Then an idea came to Miss Crone, 32, an Oxford graduate, and a teacher of languages in an Irish girls' school. She would send her manuscript to an old patron of Irish letters, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany. The Irish storyteller and playwright liked it so much that he volunteered to write an introduction, in which he calls Bridie Steen "one of the great novels of our time, not quite to be forgotten in a hundred years." With his handsome assist...
...filth and vivid images drawn from rural life, its passages of whining literalness relieved by sudden bright patches of corrupt folk poetry. His ability at recording poor white and Negro speech was, in fact, greater than his ability to make creative use of it in the framework of a novel, which is why his best pieces read more advantageously as off-center anecdotes than as realistic narratives...
...that the reader knows so much about Margy Shannon. What he learns of her is not what he ordinarily learns of the heroine of a romance, but the sort of information (with a few additions) one has about one's sister. The experience is less like reading a novel than it is like living in the same house with the girl. If she were not a nice girl to have around, the book would be intolerable. She is delightful, not in the sense of being winsome or charming, but in the sense of being authentic and of being entirely...
Husband. This seems to place the responsibility on Frankie. He is, however, the weakest character in the novel. The world that Betty Smith pictures is entirely feminine-a world into which a perception of masculine motives makes its way with the utmost difficulty. The mystery of her husband's life is not why he does not respond to her, but why he ever married her at all. "Don't get me wrong," he tells her. "I don't want to go around sleeping with fellers. I . . . I don't want to sleep with anybody. That...