Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Back to Buying. Knopf admits that the grievous inadequacy of authors, booksellers and critics does not excuse publishers for "producing the large volume of trivial, unimportant, inferior and downright unworthy stuff we do." He roasts his colleagues for handing out contracts to hopefuls who have never written novels and, worse still, for printing the results. Standards are so low, he complains, that no one "can say to any author, 'Your book is so bad that it can't be published,' because the author is just as likely as not to go down the street and sell...
...LEGACY, by Sibille Bedford. A cool, backward look at Victorian and Edwardian Europe, a time when the big rich were truly idle and upperclass life was dedicated to an endless battle with boredom. Middle-aged First-Novelist Bedford turns the cosmopolitan novel, a rare enough product nowadays, into an immensely entertaining remembrance-and indictment-of things past...
...FLYING BOX, by Mary McMinnies. An astonishingly good first novel about fumbling Britons who still pretend that they are carrying the white man's burden in Malaya. The decline and fall of Empire is measured by the spurious successes of a black-marketeering London spiv who finds loot among the ruins...
...WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, by John Cheever. The most ruefully amusing novel of the year, a story about an old New England family on the skids, with a cast of pathetically brave left-behinds, hilarious eccentrics and nice youngsters who lack the gumption of their elders...
BERLIN, by Theodor Plievier. The end of Hitler, Berlin and Germany, seen in a flaming novel that has the hallucinatory quality of a firelit death dance. The last book of a trilogy (Stalingrad and Moscow were the other two) that, collectively, tops the fiction of World...