Word: novels
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Stop reading! Oh, all right, you can keep reading that book - whatever it is (Jonathan Safran who?) - but you might as well know it's the wrong one. Maybe you didn't hear, but this week the New York Times announced the name of the greatest American novel published in the past 25 years, and unless you're reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, that ain't it. The Times contacted an eclectic list of "a couple of hundred" critics and authors, among them Harold Bloom, Michael Chabon and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and asked each of them to choose...
...Sweet Valley High School to Sweet Valley University? Other installment series feature girls who seem eternally trapped in ninth grade—there is no sense of linear time, but there are a whole lot of winter semi-formals. The success of McCafferty’s three Jessica Darling novels has proven that not all college-bound English majors are brushing up on Chaucer the summer before they leave for school. The author was among the first to acknowledge the unprecedented level of obsession many American high school students have with the college admissions process—the flaws...
...comments (“One Week Later,” April 28) that anyone associated with Harvard could or would take any smug, jealous satisfaction in the downfall of Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan caused by her apparent plagiarism in her recently released “chick-lit” novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” Nor is there any xenophobia at work here. Anyone associated with Harvard must be appalled that Harvard’s name came to be associated first with an insubstantial work of chick-literature...
...earnest and long-locked Charles Darnay (Liam R. Martin ’06) comes from an aristocratic stock, he is detained and set to become the latest victim of French peasants fighting for “liberté, egalité, vengeance.” As in Dickens’ novel, Darnay is spared by the sacrifice of Sydney Carton (Barry A. Shafrin ’09), who courageously dons Carton’s wig. But unlike the surly Carton of the book, Shafrin’s character—with thick Harry Potter glasses and too-high pants tucked into...
...editors: I am writing to refute the arguments of Charles Drummond (“Girl Interrupted,” comment, April 26). Kaavya Viswanathan, in her debut novel, has not taken “few plot points and a borrowed phrase every 10 pages,” but something much more egregious than that. She has taken the plot, prose, and language from another novel and with no reinvention whatsoever tried to pass them off as her own. Yes, I acknowledge that we live in a super-competitive age, but there are limits to everything. Let?...