Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decades, Japan learned to love things foreign. By the 1980s, housewives chatted knowledgably about Cezanne or osso bucco. Novelist Haruki Murakami riffed on the cultural alienation many Japanese feel by filling his books with meditations on jazz and the Beatles. Top Japanese fashion designers decamped to Europe, while those back home emblazoned T shirts with phrases in broken English. Some chefs even abandoned traditional cuisine for the glories of beef stew or the potato croquette. "For my parents' generation, cool meant something was from the West," recalls fashion designer Ogata. "The subtext was that Japan wasn't cool...
...sense - and I know this is going to sound strange - it is really no more than a plot point, something that plausibly carries us to the matter that, in recent years, has most obsessively concerned Philip Roth. Even his most casual readers know him as our only great erotic novelist, a man who spent his early career both hilariously and heartbreakingly exploring the contortions of the spirit that our sexuality imposes on us. Truly, to borrow the title of an earlier Roth novel, he has been our "Professor of Desire." He has done so with a truthfulness to the mess...
...eldest brother's collapse into schizophrenia, and there is the Ruby who wonders if the boy she talks to every night, cradling the phone in her bed, might ever look at her as more than a friend. It's a tricky balancing act, but for a first-time novelist, Hermann is remarkably sure-footed. When at age 14 Ruby accompanies her father, a Holocaust survivor, on his first visit to the camp where he was interned as a boy, she tries to imagine his experience but finds that "it was impossible; she could not make the leap." No sooner...
There is little doubt that Gemmy, embodying the Old World reborn in the New, is a sacred memory. But Malouf, a poet as well as a prizewinning novelist, is never too obvious. No stereotypes jump out of the bush. Crocodile Dundee and an easy way with strangers await the next century. Two of the novel's main characters survive to sample the new age. The boy who first led Fairley into town is an important government minister at the time of World War I. His cousin is a nun and natural scientist whose correspondence with a German bee expert arouses...
...heading for the wrong aircraft, the President roars, ''Son, they're all my helicopters.'' At the end, ''Q'' Clearance dangles an intriguing question: Where did a onetime spinner of sea-horse operas learn to write comedy? Perhaps from his grandfather, Humorist Robert Benchley, or from his father, Novelist Nathaniel, or even from the exasperating Johnson (Lyndon, not Samuel), for whom young Peter once worked as a White House speechwriter. In any case, this Benchley's latest effort contains some memorable slapstick. When Burnham splits his pants on the way to his first audience with the President, he solves the problem...