Word: novelistically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. TERRY SOUTHERN, 71, novelist and screenwriter; of respiratory failure; in New York City. More than that of any other artist in any genre, Southern's film work defined the '60s sensibility. His script for 1964's Dr. Strangelove, co-written with director Stanley Kubrick, showed an unerring ear for atomic-age Orwellianisms ("You can't fight here," cries President Muffley. "This is the War Room!"). The script won Southern an Oscar nomination, as did his work on another definitive film, Easy Rider...
Theroux speculates that as the Mediterranean's cities have grown larger physically, they have become smaller-minded and monoglot. Alexandria, as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it, was once home to "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds." Now it is a dull port of Arabic-speaking Arabs bound by one creed, Islam. Theroux finds the same dreary uniformity in other cities: "It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now," despite all the Senegalese selling trinkets near the Grand Canal...
...STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles...
...simple question, "What been going on while I was away?" could easily apply to the author herself who, after a prolific decade spent writing novels and short stories, has returned to the politics or, perhaps, anti-politics of poetry. Reading these latest poems, one starts to miss Atwood-the-novelist a little bit. The author's brilliance still lies in her prose, and the new book is not a landmark like Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride. Nevertheless, Morning in the Burned House is solid and thoughtful, an inventive re-working of familiar Atwood themes. It also accomplishes what...
...HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, THE name Michael Crichton will be a trivia answer, and his books will be out of print, worth nothing but regret for the trees felled to make them. Meanwhile, America's true pre-eminent novelist of ideas and scientific conundrums, Don DeLillo, will be taught in university courses, read in classic paperback reprints and celebrated for his genius. Why is the future always smarter than the present? DAN POPE West Hartford, Connecticut...