Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...covering murals with so much background and foreground that he has learned only a few ways of doing faces. One expression represents nobility, and another fills in the crowd scenes. Pentaquod, the Susquehanna Indian whose migration to the Chesapeake Bay's eastern shore in 1583 begins the new novel, is later seen as Cudjo the rebellious slave. He reappears as George Washington, who visits the bay area after the Revolution, and then as Onkor, the wise and valiant old Canada goose. There is nothing wrong with bringing George Washington or a goose onstage, but the author should make...
Putting the Stanford idea into actual practice, a team of computer scientists at M.I.T. led by Ronald Rivest has devised a novel approach. It involves what mathematicians call prime numbers-numbers (e.g., 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ad infinitum) that can be divided evenly only by themselves or by 1. Under the M.I.T. scheme, each public, or encoding, key is based on the product of two large prime numbers-that is, the result of multiplying these numbers by each other. This result may be a figure several hundred digits long. The private, or decoding, key, on the other hand...
Shosha, Singer's eighth novel, is thus a variation on a theme that the author has played many times before, and not a whitless enjoyable for that. Among his many accomplishments, Singer is a master at showing how familiarity can breed contentment. Here again is Warsaw when hailing a cab meant finding a horse-drawn droshky; here are the smells and sounds of Krochmalna Street, the intrigue and gossip at the Writers' Club, the dark, snowy vistas on the Vistula...
...agree with them. Singer is the least didactic of writers. His attention is always on making his characters do and say diverting things. Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, Aaron's mentor and friend, has only a small role in events, but his erudite, sardonic comments add enormously to the novel's texture: "I love the Jews even though I cannot stand them. No evolution could have created them. For me they are the only proof of God's existence...
...volume of Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoirs was published in March. A play, Teibele and Her Demon, co-authored by Singer and based on one of his short sto ries, has just premiered at Minneapolis' Guthrie theater. Now comes the novel Shosha. Few writers half Singer's 73 years are so prolific, and fewer still could write anything at all in the amiable chaos that surrounds him. "I get up in the morning," he says uncomplainingly, "and try to write between telephone calls...