Word: novelists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Edward Koch and Poet Allen Ginsberg hummed a mantra, and a wall-to-wall reception in the vast Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Milling around the reconstructed Temple of Dendur, star watchers could search for the Santa Claus figure of Canadian Novelist Robertson Davies and eavesdrop on the exquisite ironies of Indian-born Novelist Salman Rushdie. Beside the reflecting pool, the gifted throng could contemplate the imaginations of two great states: a perfect theocracy that maintained its inflexible slave system even in the afterlife, and a permanently unfinished republic whose contentious factions offer...
...narrative frame of Lillian is the day in 1961 when Hellman sat in deathwatch near the bedside of her longtime lover, Novelist Dashiell Hammett. Luce's choice of moment is shrewd. Unlike the sequestered Emily Dickinson, Hellman was one of life's winners, blessed with fame, money, affection and what she seemed to seek most, a measure of power. Her childhood disillusioned her. But whose childhood does not? Her adult life was not marred by more than the normal share of grief. Only the ordeal of Hammett's last illness makes her vulnerable enough for an audience to like, despite...
...Soviet Union, he found his way to France. "Somewhere along the line," he recalls, "I lost the sense of Jewish identity. My family's history, my people's history receded. I was preoccupied with my own life, my own affairs." He became a successful painter, an occasional novelist and human rights activist. "But some time after the death of my father," the author admits, "I realized that I had not truly known him, or his tradition." Halter began to sift through the evidence of World War II, then ransacked ancient volumes, diaries and letters, scouring Europe and the Middle East...
...retelling this story, Field frequently borrows verbatim from his earlier book. But there are some intriguing additions. His research since Nabokov's death in 1977 has enriched the European period between the wars and provided some naughty parts. The novelist's great-grandmother Nina von Korf continued a love affair with Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's grandfather, after he became her son-in-law. This, according to Field, accounts for the theme of incest in books like Ada and Lolita, a reversal of family history in which "the man marries the daughter in order to be able to continue more...
What is a novelist to do with an antihero who has no need of external reality except for an occasional sniff? Süskind invents several short-lived missions for Jean-Baptiste. The first, to become the "greatest perfumer of all time," is child's play. Wheedling an apprenticeship with the renowned but fading establishment of Giuseppe Baldini, Grenouille easily makes his master the toast of Paris and the rest of the civilized world. Next, he spends seven years on an isolated mountain, safe from the smells of humanity and lolling in olfactory memories. Finally, he embarks on a quest...