Word: odd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...capital of North Viet Nam a stricken city, rapidly emptying of people, without electricity and in some places water, many of its streets and even whole quarters smashed and cratered by the ferocity of daily U.S. bombing raids. Once neat one-story houses lay flattened or lurched at odd angles, roofless and windowless. On one street, a young worker in a red helmet stared numbly into a pit that was once his home. In it lay children's shattered copybooks, a dead black hen, and a mosquito net still hanging on one end from an upright beam. On another...
Lightfoot. Harry Truman was the country boy of legend who comes to the big city and outwits all the slickers. His parents and grandparents were people of the Middle Border, the odd blend of Midwesterner and Southerner that enriches Missouri with all the paradoxes of that mid-continental mixture. He was innately religious and believed in daily prayer, but like his mother, he was a lightfoot Baptist; he looked on dancing, cardplaying and bourbon drinking with a tolerant eye. He wore his provincialism as proudly as he did his loud sports shirts, which, to much of the world, represent...
...GREAT NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA RAID. An odd and original western made by Philip Kaufman, the most arresting new talent of the year...
...exactly smoothly, through wild changes of mood and attitude, from very human comedy to sharp satire to a sort of urchin wistfulness. Her reactions to her characters are so complex and abrupt that the audience is always kept lagging a little behind and slightly off balance. It is an odd sensation, but pleasant...
There are many asides, bit-part players, odd corners of narrative, even a haunting interior monologue by Clumly's blind wife. Gardner explores everything with love and forbearance, like an old-fashioned novelist who has forgotten he must compete with television, sex books and the Good Life for the raddled reader's attention. No matter. Raddled or not, readers should ignore the flaws. Swallow the magic apples. Brush up on terza rima (to identify those snippets of The Inferno that Gardner can't keep from including). Borrow a French dictionary (to translate Gardner's morsels...