Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...America, fiction is always in trouble. The novel has been receiving extreme unction for 20 years, the short story is the waif of literature, perennially searching for a home. Yet this fall, scores of worthy novels have issued from distinguished publishers; stories still find a loyal readership. Random House Editorial Director Jason Epstein notes that James Michener's novel Chesapeake is selling twice as well as his last one. A first novel, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, has sold 40,000 copies. Says Epstein: The outlook for U.S. fiction has "never been better...
Herman Gollob, editor in chief of Atheneum, admits that "there is one kind of fiction that is disappearing - the non-friction novel that gives off no sparks, that is selfconscious, competent, tedious. But the rest of the list has unprecedented vitality and variety. If you can get Judith Krantz's Scruples and John Irving's The World According to Garp on the same bestseller list, you have a thriving democratic literature. " It is a literature that will always experience depressions as well as rallies. But for now, most publishers of novels and stories are bullish on fiction...
...beautiful student a kind of Beatrice to his Dante. Although she is happily married, Natalie is immediately attracted to her professor's radiance of mind. He pursues her, she capitulates only too willingly, and they begin a year-long series of passionate, clandestine meetings. In her first novel, Ellen Schwamm takes this conventional plot and Manhattan milieu and creates a fresh and elegant narrative...
...Natalie endures two deaths in the family and Tom tries to come to terms with his wife's infidelities, their affair frays and then severs. Though the doomed lovers are portrayed with grace and wit, the novel's style is curiously oblique, conveying intensity of feeling not so much by exposition as by choice of detail and inflection...
...practically inaudible, and some of his insights are a bit unripe. But his cast is indelible and his command of narrative assured. The handful of flaws can be easily overlooked. For the author, who grew up in India, the son of American missionaries, is all of 22. His first novel marks the debut of an artist worth reading and watching closely...