Word: novelists
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DIED. ELIZABETH JANEWAY, 91, influential social critic and early feminist; in Rye, N.Y. Starting out as a novelist, she befriended Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and developed an interest in the burgeoning women's movement. In 1971 she wrote Man's World, Woman's Place, the first of six nonfiction books on gender and power that brought her national acclaim...
...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...
...COVERED First-time novelist Susan Barker's book on salarymen and geisha in Osaka, Tsunami Nights, was all the rage at Frankfurt's book show in 2003; post-disaster, publisher Doubleday picked a new moniker: Sayonara...
Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matisse's The Dance), but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultraviolent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be--as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was--about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile...