Word: novelistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problematic." Indeed so. The love of ambiguity and restless sense of privacy that made Greene one of the defining writers of the past century rendered him a mystery in life, even to himself. Fifteen or so years before his death, perhaps as one of his celebrated pranks, the aging novelist appointed an intrepid Joseph Conrad scholar, Norman Sherry, to be his official biographer. In the 28 years since his appointment, Sherry followed Greene to more than 20 countries, got dysentery in the same mountain village where Greene got dysentery and tracked down almost everyone who knew him. Yet as Sherry...
...Before he began his second career as a journalist, a man who tries to describe the world as it is, Naipaul had already made a name for himself as a novelist, a man who makes things up. He was a Trinidadian of Indian ethnicity who wrote novels that were mostly about Indians living in the Caribbean or Africa. The ancestors of these Indians, who had followed traditional ways of living, had not equipped their sons for the political or sexual complexities of the modern era. Without help from their past or their culture, Naipaul's heroes struggled against the world...
...Yorker essayist and novelist Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief was the inspiration for the film Adaptation, will discuss her new book My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. In her travel narrative, Orlean climbs Mt. Fuji, plays ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, and visits Dubya’s hometown of Midland, Texas among other notable locales. Free tickets are required and can be obtained at Harvard Book Store. 6 p.m. Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle Street...
EVEN WITH HIS 26TH BOOK about to appear in bookstores, Philip Roth is still revising. Now 71, Roth has won just about every major American award a novelist can win, but a casual suggestion--that he has been insufficiently cruel to one of his characters--gets him pondering. "I didn't think of something like that happening to him," he says, musing aloud. "I guess--you know, it's interesting that you bring that up. It's too late for me to make any changes--the finished book just arrived today--but I wonder what I could have done...
...that weren't plot enough--and it's plenty--the script by Alan Mak and Felix Chong gives Ming a mystery-novelist wife (Sammi Cheng) and Yan a pretty shrink (Kelly Chen), an ex-girlfriend and a young daughter. At the center, though, is the wary dance of Yan and Ming, each man serving two masters, each character luring the viewer to sympathize with his charade and hope that somehow both can survive. Leung, who played the warrior-lover in Hero, and Lau, Hong Kong's top pop star and movie magnet, are terrific as smart men, ruthlessly loyal, feeling...