Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reception Gorbachev shook hands with Yoko Ono and praised the contributions she and her late husband John Lennon had made to the peace movement. Mailer quipped that he had "cemented a peace pact" over dinner with Novelist Gore Vidal, with whom he has frequently feuded. Ustinov complained that a reporter from Radio Luxembourg woke him at 2 a.m. to ask what Gorbachev was going to say in a speech later that day. Everyone feasted on mounds of fresh strawberries -- a delicacy virtually unheard of in midwinter Moscow...
...ROOM, hot-shot novelist Don DeLillo turns insanity into a laughing matter. "Nothing original in that," you say, "it's been done hundreds of times since Hamlet." But DeLillo, the paragon of paranoid lit, has packed his literary loonybin with so much intelligence and dramatic punch that madness starts to look like an appealing state of affairs...
Currently, Reed chooses not to be involved in any overtly political activity, but his novels continue to wrestle with social problems. "`Political' doesn't mean anything anymore," he says. "When a novelist takes on social issues, his work is dismissed as a diatribe, not taken seriously." More than American apathy, Reed criticizes the "white elitist media" for being overly "under-class happy...
Furthermore, MacDonald does not come off all that bookish anyway. Show business, not literature, is the common ground on which this epistolary odd couple meet and swagger and josh heartily. They are put in touch by a mutual friend, the wife of Novelist Erskine Caldwell. Before long MacDonald is asking Rowan's guidance on film and TV deals for his books; Rowan reciprocates by playing back studio goings-on for MacDonald's hard-boiled appraisal. When Laugh-In takes off, the novelist watches at home in Florida with a note pad at hand, sending Rowan comments and suggestions...
Burgess's story matters because he survived to become one of England's most important postwar novelists. It entertains because it is crammed with odd, intriguing information: recipes for old-fashioned Lancashire dishes, Malayan expressions for a variety of sexual acts, the crotchety digressions of an inexhaustibly curious mind. "I suppose," Burgess writes, "that a novelist who produces an autobiography has a right to expect that most of its readers will also be readers of his fiction." In this case, he is wrong. People who have never heard of Anthony Burgess, much less John Burgess Wilson, can easily find this...