Word: novels
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...first blush, this assertion seems to drop conventional wisdom on its head. Everyone knows that the novel is literature's great grab bag, shapeless enough to accommodate nearly everything a writer wants to cram into it. Short stories allow little wasted motion. But Narayan, 78, turns out to be a perfectly accurate commentator on his own methods. Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, while shorter than most novels, is a riotous mosaic of small details in which nothing, finally, seems irrelevant...
...brother and best friend as spies, he allegedly strapped a money belt on his unsuspecting mother to bring spy payments back from Europe. Also introduced as evidence was a set of KGB instructions seized at John Walker's Norfolk home. They read like something out of a bad mystery novel. Hand-lettered in red and blue ink, the directions told Walker what route to take to meet a Soviet agent in Vienna, starting at a store called Komet Küchen, which sells kitchen cabinets. He was to make repeated stops at specified shop windows. "You will be contacted either...
...wasn't my intention for him to do it as a film," recalls Nora Ephron, 44. "I just wanted him to read it." But Director Mike Nichols, 53, thought Heartburn, Ephron's best-selling novel that resembles the breakup of her marriage to Watergate Journalist Carl Bernstein, 41, would make a good movie, and the rest, as they say, is history, or maybe her-story. Now filming in New York City, Heartburn stars Meryl Streep, 35, as the jilted cookbook writer, and Jack Nicholson, 48, as the man who gives her marital indigestion. Nicholson is replacing Mandy Patinkin...
...looks wise, or at least wised-up, beyond his years, and why not? If anyone should be used to life in the passing lane, it is Bret Easton Ellis, 21. Since his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published in May, it has sold 50,000 copies and made several best-seller lists. Ellis, meanwhile, has become a cult celebrity, showing up on Today, Firing Line and MTV. Not bad for someone who just completed his junior year at Bennington College in Vermont. Ellis' book, set in the affluent Los Angeles suburbs where he grew up, chronicles a few days...
...shoot, but a good deal of time, a suspension of time, almost an absence of time. Last week's interruption, blessedly brief, was not a time-out but a time-in. The labor leaders were starting a clock in a timeless place. One baseball season is a novel that develops into a chapter that dissolves into a sentence and ends up a phrase. A career can be that way too. Even an era. But anyway, a season is the minimum span of any meaningful attention to baseball...