Word: novella
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...break through," concluded Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, as the Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner...
...novella Starry Ticket, for example, a group of Muscovite dropouts run away to the Baltic beaches to escape the crushing conservatism of their elders. Old guard critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese...
About halfway through this collection of ten short stories and a novella, a Class C minor league baseball player named Rick Stanley hits a home run: "It would happen again, in other ball parks, in other seasons; and if Stanley had been able to cause it instead of having it happen to him, he would be in the major leagues." Author Andre Dubus, 43, specializes in such people, interested but hapless spectators of their own lives. Although many of his characters are physically rooted in New England mill towns, they walk the streets as moral transients. "Should and shouldn...
...effective means. Of these, the most common are infidelity and divorce. It is hard to tell who suffers more, the wandering parents or their children. Delivering follows two thoroughly upset brothers on their newspaper route the morning after their mother and father noisily called it quits. In the title novella, Finding a Girl in America, Dubus picks up the saga of Hank Allison that he began in two earlier volumes of stories. Experiments in consensual philandering ultimately broke up the Allison marriage. Now Hank, 35, lives alone, teaches at a small Massachusetts college and has sequential affairs with matriculating young...
...most remarkable aspect of the film is the simple way Huston and Fitzgerald have translated O'Connor's work to the screen. It works as if the novella had been the treatment for a screenplay. Like O'Connor, they make these characters seem natural when, in fact, they are grossly unnatural. When Haze wraps himself in barbed wire, a sequence that is at first horrifying becomes tender and comic because these characters really breathe, bleed and smile. Fitzgerald even allows some of O'Connor's imagery to creep into the dialogue when Enoch describes a woman with "hair so thin...