Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Young-adult novels, as the genre used to be called, still center on disenfranchised adolescents who could be direct descendants of Holden Caulfield. Now, though, says Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher of Front Street Books, "the heat has been turned up." Front Street helped bring so-called bleak books to early teens in 1997 when it published one book set in a juvenile-detention facility (Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree) and another in which a 13-year-old sleeps with her mother's boss (Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves). They were followed by Melvin Burgess...
...then, when I finish, I'll immediately pick up another book. Maybe this time it will be a novel. Or will it be a biography? Perhaps a play? I'm not sure, but I hope to finish it before school starts again...
...with his female patients and insists on burdening him with a tale of an encounter she had at a seaside resort, where she and a young naval officer eyed each other erotically. Nothing more than that happened, but she tells her husband, in language that is almost identical in novel and screenplay, "Had he called me--I thought--I could not have resisted him...and at the same time you were dearer to me than ever...
...before the camera, for example), then dashing those hopes. It is also a movie that, to put the matter bluntly, constantly edges right up to the thin line separating the emotionally persuasive from the risible, and one that at any moment in the process of (literally) fleshing out the novel's abstractions could dissolve into the unconsciously comical. That's the most obvious danger when your subject is not sex itself, where there are plenty of conventions to guide the filmmaker, but sex in the mind, for which there are very few precedents to guide...
...writing course. He was a humane critic, seldom unkind, with few foibles. (I once did hear him say, "Faulkner makes me giggle.") The books he loved most were those that bore two Fadiman standards: lucidity and a mind at work. He found those qualities most notably in a first novel of the 1950s. Not all his colleagues agreed with him, but with his remarkable powers of persuasion, he got "concurrence" from the board on The Catcher in the Rye--"that rare miracle of fiction," Kip called it, "a human being created out of ink, paper and the imagination...