Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Founded by Rice, who has enlisted the assistance of fellow professors to judge the entries (some 700 so far), the contest was named in dishonor of poor Edward G.E.L. Bulwer-Lytton. A popular and workmanlike 19th century British novelist, Bulwer-Lytton wrote a book, Paul Clifford, that unfortunately began, "It was a dark and stormy night. . ." Among the exquisitely bad sentences sent to the California (zip code: 95192) judges: "Screaming like a banshee, bargaining like a waterfront drug dealer, bleeding like a side of beef in an abattoir, the Chinese sailor croaked out one word: 'Firelight' (a code...
...Politburo clearly value. The democratic movement within the Soviet Union that first surfaced in the 1960s and gained impetus from the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Human Rights has been all but crushed. Punishment for dissent has been selectively tailored for the dissidents: some are expelled, as outspoken Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in 1974; others, like Nobel Peace Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov, are sent into internal exile; still others?like Sergei Batovrin, spokesman for an independent peace group-are shut away in psychiatric hospitals. Finally, there is the Gulag, which, according to human rights activists, holds some 1,000 known political prisoners...
According to Dale, Chesterton published 78 books. Not all are fine or triumphant, and far more than half are forgotten. But that is no reason for regret. As Father Andrew Greeley, the sociologist and pop novelist, comments, "In Books in Print I found nine volumes of H.G. Wells and eleven volumes of G.B. Shaw ... for Chesterton the list goes up to more than thirty. With thirty volumes listed, who needs a 'revival'?" If one ever becomes necessary, The Outline of Sanity is the place to begin...
...dead we owe only the truth," said Voltaire. David Plante has given very little of either to the subjects of this memoir. Among the three "difficult women" in question, only Feminist Germaine Greer emerges from Plante's portrayal with a shred or two of personal dignity. Novelist Jean Rhys, who died in 1979, and Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, who died a year later, have been observed in the distorting half-light of their declining days, when illness and alcoholism had served to dim the mind and obscure the spirit...
Jean Rhys was almost 80 when she first encountered Plante, a young American writer living in London. Plante, who later became an accomplished novelist (The Family, The Woods), set out to help Rhys write an autobiography. He candidly recalls, "I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of." But the sentient novelist who had written the melancholy Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 was long gone. She spent most of their time together drinking gin and sweet vermouth and babbling away in a pitiful parody of her once considerable style and charm. Plante...