Word: phenomenons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
First things first, Kim Edwards is not a Wunderkind. Yes, her very first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin; 401 pages), has become the literary phenomenon of the summer. Despite its total lack of biblical codes, serial killers or Sudoku, The Memory Keeper's Daughter has just hit No. 1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. "It's a thing you almost don't dream about, because it seems so impossible to have it happen," Edwards says, on the phone from her home in Lexington, Kentucky...
...Edwards published a short story collection, Secrets of the Fire King, in 1997 (it was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway prize) and sold The Memory Keeper's Daughter in 2003. It was a mild success in hardcover - it sold well for literary fiction - but nothing like the phenomenon it's become in paperback. "I've been writing seriously for 20-plus years, and getting a certain level of critical acclaim," she says. "I haven't felt like I've been writing in obscurity, let's say that. I felt like I've had an audience for my work...
...pigeonhole them into crude caricatures—the necromantic Victor Frankenstein who yells “Eureka!” and laughs madly, or the crotchety old hunchback laboring over fuming beakers—that are strange and abnormal. The dehumanization of scientists is not simply a Western phenomenon. But in contrast to the West, where the scientist is politely told to take a seat in the backroom where no one will notice his odd mannerisms and strangeness, Eastern societies have dehumanized the scientist in a completely opposite way: They have deified him. In many Asian countries, scientists are national...
Nobody is sure whether the simultaneous drop in wildflower diversity is the cause or the effect of the bee decline. But scientists think the overall phenomenon may be linked mainly to loss of habitat for both plants and bees as countryside is plowed over for development--yet another price nature is paying for human civilization...
...popular fiction. "Mickey Spillane's contribution is far beyond mystery or crime writing," crime-book editor Martin Greenberg says in the affectionate and impressive documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (available as part of the three-disc set Max Allan Collins' Black Box). "I think he's a phenomenon in regard to the whole explosion of the mass-market paperback, and was probably its first great star." Spillane's popularity spawned a generation of tough-guy, "paperback-original" novelists - Jim Thompson, Charles Williams and a raft of others whose works were filmed by the French New Wave directors...