Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most part, the answer is no. We see Marler worry about and eventually pass his General Exams in the Harvard English department, struggle with a psychotic roommate and fail in the pursuit of Pamela, an enigmatic novelist, but none of these things make the leap from anecdote to art. The monologue often relies on mere local reference to keep the audience interested. We get a sort of thrill from hearing places and people we know mentioned on stage. When Marler does strive for larger meaning, he usually achieves only pretension--as with the title, which has no more concrete meaning...
...cliches, use your own mind and think of something original," my slender 45-year old bachelorette eighth grade English teacher would always instruct me, the 13-year old budding novelist...
Well I've grown since then. I've become a sportswriter instead of a novelist, and I frequently us cliches...
...Love with Daylight (Simon & Schuster; 252 pages; $23) and Paul West's A Stroke of Genius (Viking; 181 pages; $21.95) are similar medical memoirs, kind of Blue Cross specials in which the writers recount their tussles with diseases and the imperfect professionals who treat them. Sheed is a novelist, essayist and critic with few equals in the styling of buoyant observations on the decline and fall of just about everything. Prolific only begins to describe West, whose 14 novels, nine works of nonfiction and two volumes of poetry exhibit a range of imagination and richness of expression that were greatly...
...some such doldrum, adrift in giddiness or despair, Chabon decided to write about a novelist who can't get his next novel written. Sure enough, Wonder Boys (Villard; 368 pages; $23) is, rather too cutely, not just the title of Chabon's book, but of the novel his hero Grady Tripp can't bring himself to finish. Tripp's well-reviewed early books are receding into the distant past, and he feels fraudulent when his writing students admire them. He pretends optimism to his editor, but the truth is that his half-written book is an unreadable mass of unstrung...