Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...annual conference as a kind of fascinating academic comedy club, where nutty professors delivered papers on "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Three years ago, when Alter's group came together, some of the biggest names in American letters signed on, including scholars Alfred Kazin and Roger Shattuck, novelist Cynthia Ozick, poet Donald Hall and the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. "I don't think the MLA is the evil empire," says Alter, who maintains membership in both groups. "It's an umbrella organization. But academic people are conformist. With 30,000 people under one big top, you have...
...Snow's famous 1959 essay, "The Two Cultures," the British novelist and social critic described the huge gap in mutual understanding and shared knowledge between two groups. "Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists... The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour...
...Novelist Thomas Perry's answers (which seem to be, respectively, "quite hard" and "not much") have carried him handily through three highly readable if not altogether believable episodes in the career of Jane Whitefield, a lone operative of stunning beauty and bone-crushing martial-arts skills. She is half Seneca Indian and half Irish American, and her useful talent is to function as a very unofficial one-woman witness-relocation program, helping people disappear into new identities when the forces of evil are about to pounce. She thinks of herself as "a guide," and she most often guides with brainpower...
...their two small children. "Friends said, 'Don't let Jane get married, or she'll maybe even, you know, have a baby.'" Perry, who is white, was reared in Tonawanda, in upstate New York, in what is still to some extent Seneca country. Making Whitefield a cross-cultural Seneca (novelist Tony Hillerman's Navajo cop Jim Chee, for instance, seems more thoroughly Indian) gave Perry an opportunity to learn more about the local Native American culture. And making her a woman "let me see whether I could write about 51% of the population." He has nearly finished another Whitefield novel...
DIED. AMOS TUTUOLA, 77, Nigerian novelist who foraged into Yoruba folklore for his grisly tales; in Ibadan, Nigeria. In prose unfettered by grammatical conventions, Tutuola depicted mythic odysseys. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a wino travels to the afterworld and battles a horned monster to appease his hellish thirst...