Word: paper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year that the U.S. would invade if the West knew the full extent of food shortages plaguing their country. The Chosun Ilbo, a major South Korean newspaper, claimed in Wednesday editions to have obtained the full text of a speech delivered by Kim in Pyongyang last December 7. The paper reported that Kim told party leaders that food shortages could set off widespread rioting in North Korea, despite the government's strong grip on power, and that even military personnel were hungry. Kim is quoted as saying: "If the U.S. imperialists knew that our military doesn't have food, they...
This controversy provides the impetus for the surreal plot of The Term Paper Artist. In the novella, the character named David Leavitt, distraught over the suppression of his novel and suffering from writer's block as a result, hides out at his father's house in Los Angeles and does halfhearted research at the UCLA library for a novel he's pretty sure he will never write. By chance he meets Eric, an attractive undergraduate, who invites him to his apartment to share some marijuana. Hoping for sex, Leavitt learns that the seductive Eric has a more complex transaction...
...other two novellas in Arkansas, The Wooden Anniversary and Saturn Street, are perfectly fine, filled with interesting characters and mordant wit. But The Term Paper Artist is spectacularly effective fiction, an oblique and very funny commentary on Leavitt's real-life travails. Having been accused of plagiarism, he spins out a story in which he happily abets plagiarists...
...near the end of the novella. "The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." This is not quite true. Paul Theroux offered an invented autobiography last year in My Other Life, and Philip Roth did much the same in 1993 in Operation Shylock. The Term Paper Artist is as playful as those works and every bit as good...
HONOR ROLLS Please don't squeeze the exhibits. Wisconsin's four-year-old Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue has reached the 3,000-roll mark. One valued relic: loo paper from Graceland...