Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...professional man of letters, like the shepherd and the blacksmith, is a vanishing species, found mainly in the British Isles. William Plomer, who died in 1973 at the age of 69, was a notable specimen. He made his debut at 21 with Turbott Wolfe, a novel that Leonard and Virginia Woolf recognized as a minor masterpiece when he submitted it to their Hogarth Press. For half a century, biographies, essays, librettos, novels and poems fell from his prolific pen; Plomer had no typewriter. "Machines do not like me," he explained. "When I touch them they tend to break down...
Dank dungeons, gothic ruins and rainswept mountain peaks are fine for inducing the creeps. But when it comes to high-grade macabre, there's no place like home. Take the London house furnished by British Author Ian McEwan, 29, in this tight, unsettling first novel. The place stands almost deserted amid urban rubble, one of the few survivors of a highway plan that went nowhere. In it live Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom, a reasonably normal array of siblings ranging in age from 17 to six, and their mother, who is dying. The earlier death of the father...
...weapons that include camera-fired fléchettes, boomslang venom, plastique-packed tea bags, flame-throwing hair dryers, nerve gas and atomic tennis balls. Nor can they figure who or what is the ubiquitous Chalice, or whether the Mancneff partnership can hold up. As for the Irvholz team, its novel is clever, cynical and compelling...
Drugs and thugs, a missing person and a backchatting investigator also dominate Cocaine and Blue Eyes. Fred Zackel's sprightly first novel, set mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, combines the story of a Pacific Heights dynasty, corporate shenanigans, Chinatown gangs, a spectrum of sex, aging flower children, Mafia money and the houseboat life in Sausalito. The result is as nerve-rattling as a full-throttle auto chase from Grant Avenue to Fisherman's Wharf...
...family business is being run by a homosexual Chinatown lawyer and his epicene "nephew." The nephew is quietly siphoning off cash to finance a cocaine-smuggling operation, and the tale moves to a bewildering but believable showdown. His publisher reports that Sausalito-based Zackel is working on a second novel, which on the evidence should be as welcome as San Francisco's cracked-crab season...