Word: novels
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Umberto Eco looks like a genial mentor, white-bearded and approachable, his comfortable rotundity settled deep in the softest armchair of his Milan living room. Yet the 73-year-old academic and author, condemned to international celebrity by his 1980 debut novel The Name of the Rose, is not without thorns. Today's discourse - ranging from his newest work of fiction, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, to politics, religion and neckties - bristles with sharp observations. Avuncular he may seem, but this famous European intellectual has not mellowed with age. Age, memory and nostalgia are, however, the central themes...
Hayao Miyazaki has dreamed beautifully on film for ages; Japan's master of anime won an Oscar for his rapturous Spirited Away. Now he adapts a novel by Diana Wynne Jones about Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), a Cinderella type who, under a witch's spell, instantly becomes a 90-year-old crone (Jean Simmons) and takes residence in the portable home of the birdman Howl (Christian Bale, speaking in Clint Eastwood's gruff whisper...
...great thing about being an obscure novelist is that it doesn't matter what you write. "I could do pretty much whatever I wanted," Michael Cunningham remembers fondly, "because nobody was likely to pay attention." That was before Cunningham wrote The Hours, his moving reimagination of the novel Mrs. Dalloway and the life of its author, Virginia Woolf. The book won a Pulitzer. Nicole Kidman got an Oscar for the movie. Just like that, Cunningham's precious obscurity was gone. "It's harder to feel the necessary degree of recklessness when people are paying attention," he says. "You have...
...sobriety to give someone, usually Michael Caine as Alfred, Bruce's faithful, fussy butler, something smart to say. Eventually, however, Nolan, who directed the tricky, widely admired Memento, must oblige the conventions of the big-budget action movie: darkly improbable weaponry, pyrotechnics, car chases (the Batmobile is admittedly pretty novel), editing that edges toward incomprehensibility...
...American counterculture icon Jack Kerouac; by his agent; while going through old files in a New Jersey warehouse. Kerouac, whose semi-autobiographical stories featured his enlightenment-seeking, hard-drinking literary buddies Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, wrote the three-act play in 1957, the same year his epic novel On the Road was printed, but it was never performed or published. Best Life magazine, which will carry an excerpt from Beat Generation in its July issue, describes it as "a day in the drink- and drug-hazed life of [Kerouac's] own literary alter...