Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...readers are always delighted when they find a writer who really acts and talks like one. When Parnassus on Wheels, a quaint little novel about an itinerant bookseller, was published back in 1917, many readers decided that they had found their man. Christopher Morley was clever with a whimsical plot and wrote in the studied, slightly archaic style of another century. The tweedy, pipe-smoke flavor of his looks and books reminded many of the country-squire tradition among English men of letters. With each succeeding Morley work, readers who had cut their teeth on J. M. Barrie...
Once more their patience has been rewarded-but not so amusingly this time. Christopher Morley's new novel, The Man Who Made Friends With Himself, is a long epigram-studded footnote on the life of Richard Tolman, a literary agent who commutes and ruminates between his Long Island home and his Manhattan office. His story is a memoir found after his death...
...reason for this is that in all her twelve novels, Ivy Compton-Burnett has never tried to tell a convincing story. With her, any old melodrama (even including secret drawers, lost wills, fantastic skeletons in impeccable family closets) passes for plot; all Novelist Compton-Burnett needs is the chance to reveal what she is really interested in revealing-the vices, virtues and idiosyncrasies of human behavior. To this end, too, the people in her novels talk all the time but never talk naturally: unlike real people they always say just what they think, and mean just what they say; when...
Wylie's mistake (a good money-marking mistake, of course) was to put these ideas into a cheap shiny novel. "Generation of Vipers" said it all much better, years ago, without the girls...
Nine years ago, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, an overworked schoolteacher in upstate New York, bowled over the nation's critics with his first novel, a precision-built tour de force called The Ox-Bow Incident. Its firm, restrained handling of the problem of good and evil arising from a mob lynching crowned Clark with the halo of great promise. Five years later came The City of Trembling Leaves, a long, rambling study of sensitive youth in Reno, Nev., which made readers wonder if Ox-Bow had not been an accident of perfection. His new novel will keep them wondering...