Word: pop
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...Bond films so much as test-drive them. In that spirit, here's a quick rundown, on a scale of 0 to 10. Opening credit sequence: 5 - the usual semi-abstract woman's form, liquid and monumental. The song: 4 - Jack White and Alicia Keys duet on a power-pop number that's tenacious but not delightful. Chief villain: 6 - Amalric, who normally plays underdogs, hasn't the stature of a Dr. No or a Salamanca, but he's got the evil sneer down pat. Bond girl: 9 - Olga Kurylenko is more than OK. Fight scenes: 9 - frenetic, if familiar...
...novels still do what novels have always done: serve as guides in a confusing world. "Suddenly, everything has changed so much," says novelist and publisher Namita Gokhale. "So people use these books to try to find where they're located in all this." And that has made the new pop fiction a runaway success. Helped additionally by low prices (novels are priced around $5) and new distribution channels (the books are sold on street corners and in department-store chains like Big Bazaar, not just in conventional bookstores), first-time authors are moving more than 20,000 copies a year...
...pile is Chetan Bhagat, whom fellow pop author Anirban Bose calls the "Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary of Indian mass-market publishing." Bhagat's three books, the first of which was published in 2004, have sold more than a million copies. One has been made into a Bollywood film and another is in production. "Chetan Bhagat's success demonstrated that there was a huge market for Indian fiction, with everyday Indian characters acting out everyday Indian stories," says Bose. "Publishers took note that homegrown talent was finding a voice, and that publishing authors like us was not only not risky...
...these authors, and there is a sense of defiance in choosing to write about the present - an insistence that the stories of how Indians live now are just as worthy of being told as the more self-consciously literary sagas set in some supposedly more romantic past. Indian pop fiction might be banished to second-class status by critics, says Bhagat, "but it's not that to the people who read it." For them, it tells the stories of their own lives, and looks ahead to India's thrilling if uncertain future...
...eyes were on her loss not because it was especially horrific--in a spate of shootings this summer, Chicago had seen plenty of tragedy. It was because her story was attached to another that had enthralled America. Her sister Jennifer is not just famous; she is an emblem of pop-cultural redemption, an American Idol favorite who was eliminated in the finals but went on to greater triumph with an Oscar-winning role in the movie Dreamgirls. She had transcended her backstory and her roots as a reality star to become a real...