Word: novelists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pages of spare description at the outset of the somewhat old-fashioned romantic adventure Charlotte Gray (Random House; 399 pages; $24.95), novelist Sebastian Faulks makes a promise that somewhat old-fashioned readers expect and understand. The brief opening scene takes a Spitfire pilot over Nazi-occupied France on a lone mission and brings him back to his British home field, his fragile plane's tail controls damaged by antiaircraft fire. He makes a ragged landing and climbs out of the cockpit, shaking. A mechanic asks, "How was it, Greg?" He answers, "It was cold...
...endorsement. DON IMUS, radio's most popular curmudgeon, created the awards to counter the "elitist" selections of those other book honors. Of the four winners announced last week, two were selected by Imus and two by listeners, who voted for their favorites online. Imus' top pick was Freedomland by novelist Richard Price, who will take home $100,000. The other three winners (Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch, King of the World by David Remnick and My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki) were each awarded $50,000, a pile of loot five times as great as that pocketed...
...aide-de-camp may have been one Syms Covington, an obscure British sailor who, though he's barely mentioned in Darwin's writings, toiled at his side throughout his early career, bagging the vast array of specimens upon which Darwin founded his theory of natural selection. Now, in Australian novelist Roger McDonald's Mr. Darwin's Shooter (Atlantic Monthly Press; 365 pages; $25), Covington becomes a memorable figure in his own right--the humble, devoted triggerman who did the great scientist's dirty work...
East-coast intellectuals, like Appalachian mountain folk, are famous for their feuds. When Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy in the 1950s, the political elite chose sides, and some still aren't speaking. After novelist Mary McCarthy called playwright Lillian Hellman a liar--or, more precisely, said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'"--the literary crowd split in two. They're at it again. That rumbling out of Washington is the sound of a new chattering class feud--and unaligned wordsmiths had better head for the hills...
...relationship with Mailer was, as Trilling might have said, complicated. Podhoretz felt that Mailer, like Ginsberg, made an artistic pose of excess--too much of his work being merely a sort of riot against normality. Podhoretz stood up for Mailer after the novelist stabbed his wife Adele in the course of a fight at a party in 1959, but the two men parted company at last because they wound up on different sides of too many cultural and ideological barricades...