Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Stauffer has taught English 176a, “American Protest Literature,” which Buell described as one of the most popular courses in the department, English 172, “19th-Century American Novel,” and English 90kw, “The American Civil...
...satire has a certain measure of futility built into it. If you were really serious about solving a problem, the reader can't help thinking, you wouldn't be sitting around crafting a gently mocking novel about it; you'd be out there doing something. The real targets of satire tend to be impervious to it, anyway. As Jonathan Swift put it, "Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Of course, Swift is talking about far less sophisticated readers than you and I. Poor suckers...
...Perrotta's suburban satire, Little Children (St. Martin's; 355 pages), is almost certainly talking about somebody around here. Perrotta is probably best known as the author of Election, a novel about a vicious race for class president at a New Jersey high school that became a satisfyingly nasty movie. He didn't invent the notion that high school sucks, nor is he breaking new ground when he reveals that American suburbs are petri dishes of ennui and alienation. But he shows admirable zeal in prosecuting the case, and he comes as close as anybody to answering a not unimportant...
Alexander Mccall Smith is fond of a fat--make that traditionally built--woman named Precious. Their dalliance began as many a relationship has, during a holiday in France. On a trip in 1996, McCall Smith scribbled a few lines of a short story, which grew into a novel and then into a series chronicling the life of Precious Ramotswe, owner of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Gaborone, Botswana. Five books into the series, he has no intention of breaking it off. "To say goodbye now would be like leaving in the middle of a conversation," the Zimbabwean-born...
...daughters--one at college, the other younger) and a monograph on the criminal law of Botswana. A new series of books about Isabel Dalhousie, a female gumshoe in Edinburgh, is well under way; the first installment, The Sunday Philosophy Club, is due out in September. A satirical novel about academics, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, is expected in early 2005. And the sixth Ramotswe book is already finished. How does he manage it all? "I'm very lucky," he says. "I don't have to make a great effort." He estimates his writing speed at an astonishing 1,000 words an hour...