Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Alice Walker ascended from the realm of mere literature after Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel The Color Purple. The movie's huge commercial success -- and the controversy that arose over its portrait of black males -- ensured Walker's public renown as a woman with a cause, an author who, when she has a message, would rather write a book than call Western Union. Indeed, her poetry and fiction have always been, to some extent, polemical. Now that her potential audience has increased many times over, Walker, 45, has become more forthright about the burden of her prose...
...PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving (Morrow; $19.95). In this inventive, indignant novel, a boisterous cast and a spirited story line propel a sawed- off Christly caricature through two decades of U.S. foreign-policy debacles...
...Broadway, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly explores the boundaries of power, sex and race. In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, published last month, Chinese mothers offer their children a series of poignant confessionals. China's repressive Cultural Revolution is the subject of a forthcoming autobiographical novel, A Generation Lost, by Zi-Ping Luo. The Chinese immigrant, now a professor of chemistry at Caltech, was 14 when the Red Guards closed her school...
Given this feverish interest in China, it was inevitable that Occidental travelers would add their own speculations about the People's Republic. Two years ago, Mark Salzman wrote Iron and Silk, a recollection of his years as an English teacher in Changsha. Next spring he will produce a novel, tentatively titled Journey to the West, that mixes Chinese myth and actuality. And next month will bring The Great Black Dragon Fire, by veteran journalist Harrison Salisbury. The fire was not fiction; it occurred in 1987, and it burned a Manchurian forest "so large that, like China's Great Wall...
...LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan (Putnam; $18.95). A bright, sharp-flavored first novel on the subject of growing up ethnic in the U.S. The topic sounds familiar, but the Chinese spice added to this old recipe is invigorating and refreshingly true...