Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exasperatingly pretentious as anyone in the not overly humble world of cultural punditry. Her work abounds in self-contradictions. She is a girl almost without a sense of humor; yet she made her reputation with an article on the high frivolity of 'camp.' She is a part-time novelist [who writes] ... like a grim translation from the German: 'By literary genre,' she observes, 'I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain.' She is the kind of girl who takes 33 talky pages to tell you that...
...daughter of a toweringly successful Hepburnesque actress. Bertie and Clea both have regular acting gigs on Starwatch, and when an older actor named Thad Michelet arrives on the set, it turns out that he is burdened with an overbearing parent of his own--his father is a wildly famous novelist. The three bond on sight, with an audible magnetic click...
...masters, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. So vast is Murakami's fame that nearly as many books have been written about him as by him. A Taiwan newspaper has even suggested that his visage may one day grace a Japanese banknote, as does that of Meiji-era novelist Soseki Natsume, a Murakami influence. Others he admires, Murakami has admitted, include Fitzgerald, Carver, David Foster Wallace and Tim O'Brien, all of them Americans. Indeed, Murakami's fondness for U.S. pop-cultural references has moved local critics to complain that he worships the West at the expense of things...
...take. His 12-year-old son Charley, the kind of introverted preteen who would never deign to express interest in anything, gets hooked on anim?, manga and all things cool that are Japanese. Charley's excitement is enough to inspire his father, and soon the middle-aged literary novelist is parsing the finer points of Akira and Astro Boy. Carey is intrigued enough by this dazzling stuff?he hopes they'll "enter the mansion of Japanese culture through its garish, brightly lit back door"?but his real intention is to connect with Charley, who is on the brink of disappearing...
...problem, as any 12-year-old could tell, is that Carey is trying too hard. With his novelist's critical intelligence, he seeks to ferret out the meaning of modern Japan, while Charley is content to skip the subtitles and absorb it image by image. The contrast is accentuated by the presence of Takashi, a spiky-haired 15-year-old who serves as a kind of alternative guide to Japanese pop culture. The father looks at Takashi and his son in the electric district of Akihabara and sees a "mutated species"?one that he worries has become all but incomprehensible...