Word: novella
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every tale, whether it was a novella or a paragraph, was given what Thomas Mann called a "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear and correct style." Kafka's pathological concern for style was so extreme that only a few tales were published in his lifetime. But the meticulousness that made him a dangling, indecisive figure in life produced modern myths in a prose like shards of glass. It was meant to be lucid, and it was intended to cut. It has drawn blood for 50 years...
Shortly after the 1962 release of his first work, the prison-camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn composed a prayer-poem, which became part of the body of work honored by the Templeton Foundation. Solzhenitsyn recalled last week, "I was being subjected to increasing pressure and harassment. At this time I experienced a feeling that I had support-supernatural support. I wrote [the prayer] in the consciousness of the various outcomes that could be called my fate: maybe this is the last moment. Maybe this is it." But it was only the beginning...
...wall of Levine's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is a framed quotation from Thomas Mann's novella The Tables of the Law, given to the conductor by his longtime live-in companion, Sue Thomson. It reads, in part: "Mighty and long labor lay ahead, labor which would have to be achieved through anger and patience before the uncouth hordes could be formed into a people who would be more than the usual community to whom the ordinary was comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting...
...volumes of Rabbit Run on the island of St. Thomas? Bech is lured by Su-perbooks, a subsidiary of the Superoil Corp., to autograph 28,500 sheets, at $1.50 each (Updike was paid a bit more), to be bound in pigskin into a special limited edition of his novella Brother Pig. The assignment carries with it an all-expenses-paid two-week working holiday in the Caribbean with the companion of Bech's choice, who will pull each sheet from under his busy pen. Bech brings along Norma, the reliable mistress whom he will never marry...
...socialists in Italy. Young Benito was a loner with what would now be called sociopathic tendencies, a street fighter who looked on violence as the natural way to get what he wanted. Yet he was unquestionably intelligent. He read extensively in German, French and English and even wrote a novella in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. It is history's loss, if not literature's, that it was never published. Another work of fiction, an anticlerical novel, was printed and achieved some success...