Word: novella
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sometime in 1891, Robert Louis Stevenson completed a novella-length narrative about the South Pacific called The Beach of Falesa. By this time, the Scottish-born and immensely popular author was living in Samoa, at a far remove from his publishers in London and New York City; an answer to a letter sent by steamer mail took three months to return. As a result, Stevenson delegated loose authority over his manuscripts to several confidants, to speed up both the process of getting into print and the payment of his royalties. But editors on both sides of the Atlantic were perturbed...
...commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash, surprisingly enough, is a delight, largely because it knits up all that has gone before...
...knows? But now, in the title novella, we see where the question leads. The narrator, a blocked writer, has moved from his wife and his comfortable home in Connecticut to a Greenwich Village pad. He can't write in the burbs, can't stand the entanglement. Can he write in the Village? Well, he's trying, but his roiling thoughts won't order themselves tamely and obediently into fiction. There he sits at his desk, staring idly out of the window, listening to his middle-aged frame creak, finding a suspicious bump on his scrotum, brooding...
...event is the story of how Kent Stowell of the Pacific Northwest Ballet convinced a reluctant Sendak to design a new production of the ballet. The familiar stage version is not Hoffmann at all, but rather a hybrid based largely upon Alexander Dumas's bland synthesis of Hoffmann's novella. Sendax became interested in the Nutcracker, when he learned that Stowell intended to crack the old Dumas chestnut with Hoffmann's stronger Nutcracker. The Seattle production was a great success. The triumphant ballet complements the publication of this first adequate and wonderful translation...
...respecting stage or opera director would think of missing an opportunity to reevaluate, re-interpret or otherwise revise even the most pedigreed plays and operas. Bizet's Carmen cut to four singers and 82 minutes to recapture the gritty spirit of Mérimée's novella? Peter Brook undertook the radical surgery three years ago in Paris. Berg's Wozzeck set in a 19th century insane asylum? That was Hans Neugebauer and Achim Freyer's novel perspective in a Cologne production revived last season. Maxim Gorky's Summer Folk implausibly...