Word: novellas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wolff, who won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner award for the novella "The Barracks Thief," writes accurately about the myriad isolations of military life. "The Barracks Thief" is about a boy so angry he has no space for other emotions; he falls naturally into soldiering. "Soldier's Joy" hearkens back to the emotional territory of "The Barracks Thief." The story, like its predecessor, is about how soldiers socialize, or fail to socialize with one another...
...Rings Twice because Hollywood had ruined all his books. "Cain looked over at his shelf and said, 'No, they are all still right there.' " Besides, King's work has inspired a bona fide hit in 1986: Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, an adaptation of The Body, a 1982 novella that focuses on a group of twelve-year-olds searching for the body of a boy who was struck by a train...
...FRIEND DESCRIBED Smooth Talk as the story of a 15-year-old girl in the first flush of her sexuality, which seemed like a compelling enough reason to see it--having been there myself. The film also happens to be based on a Joyce Carol Oates novella, another point to recommend it; and, in spite of its low $1 million budget, Smooth Talk managed to garner the Grand Prize at the U.S. Film Festival...
...books have been optioned over the years by moviemakers, but none of Saul Bellow's works have ever made it to the screen. The first exception will be Seize the Day. Bellow's tragicomic 1956 novella about the decline and foibles of a Manhattan salesman is now being made into a TV movie for PBS in New York City. The film, being produced by former Princeton students of Bellow's, has delighted the author, and last week he visited the set to make a cameo appearance walking down a hotel corridor past his hapless protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, played by Robin...
...ever seems calculated or artificial. The Mist begins: "This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen." The novella-length story is an exercise in escalating gruesomeness, and the urgency and awkwardness of the narrative lend credence to the preposterous. So does the setting, a supermarket where a random bunch of shoppers have been trapped by what may be the end of the world. Familiar brand names anchor...