Word: novella
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gordimer a one-subject writer. Of the title novella and nine stories that make up Something Out There, four have nothing to do with apartheid or South Africa. Letter from His Father is a jeu d'esprit altogether outside the land of the living. From beyond the grave, Hermann Kafka answers a famous message left by his son Franz: "You wrote me a letter you never sent. It wasn't for me-it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!)" The old man is not content simply...
...every great writer's widow or lover who wants to destroy letters and diaries containing the secrets of the past, there is some literary snoop who longs to publish them. Such a struggle is the theme of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and that marvelous 1888 novella is in turn the inspiration for The Golden Age, A.R. Gurney's comic update, which opened on Broadway two weeks...
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. The 1982 Nobel laureate mixes imagination and fact into a suspenseful novella of honor and revenge in a Colombian town...
ONLY WHEN HARDWICK focuses upon a work of fiction does she unite form with content. The title essay, "Bartleby in Manhattan", is one of the finest in the collection. She takes Herman Melville's novella. "Bartleby the Scrivener", and dissects it as a verbal tour de force. Bartleby speaks only 37 times in a story of 16,000 words concerning himself, and each time he speaks he does so in a variation of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Hardwick convincingly equates Bartleby's character with the modern New Yorker; his footlessness is the predecessor...
...several moments in this collection of eight short stories and a novella, characters turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind...