Word: novels
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...Washington by lampooning the self-serving banalities of political memoirs. This capital à clef was written by onetime White House Intimate Christopher Buckley, 33, former speechwriter for Vice President George Bush, as well as the son of Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley, an old friend of the Reagans'. The novel, however, "doesn't seem to have hurt any feelings," admits Buckley. "Maybe I've failed...
...without Taillon's booming, animated commentary. He became something more than legendary to those who followed the sport. Said one admirer: "I don't know what God looks like, but I know what He sounds like." In 1977 his daughter, Cyra McFadden, created a literary stir with her first novel. The Serial, a wry look at some laid-back suburban lives in California's Marin County. There was not much in this book, frankly, to attract die-hard rodeo fans. On the other hand, it seems fair to assume that most of those who bought and enjoyed The Serial...
Twenty years ago, Frank Bascombe, hero of Ford's new novel, probably would have been a college English instructor with a stalled novel, a broken marriage and a string of women who leave him anesthetized and wistful. That was when the literary man was something of a culture hero. Bascombe has given up on that idea, although he retains some of the baggage: he has an abandoned novel titled Tangier, an ex-wife whom he calls X, and Vicki, a good ole girl from Texas who is a nurse and an effective pain killer. To earn a living, he covers...
Bascombe is appealing, but a novel about a man who has lost his will to write novels is always in danger of trying the reader's patience. His repeated assertions that uncertainty is the only certainty are a bit modish, as is his belief that literature is not in the enlightening business, but should aim to create "disturbances." Nevertheless, Ford accomplishes the first requirement of fiction: the making of a convincing illusion. Frank Bascombe inhabits an all too believable dreamworld. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...took an X-Acto knife on one of our little models," Stumpf recalls, "and I just cut that slip in there. I knew right away it would work." Flex and absolute structural integrity without gimmicks: the chair is its material and structure. In addition, the designers engineered a novel tilt mechanism. Because the pivot is forward, at a point behind the knees, leaning backward in an Equa does not lift one's feet off the floor inexorably...