Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will not try to get away until he knows how it all comes out. But then his imagination...
Despite his familiarity with almost every aspect of the moviemaking business, Corliss has no interest in writing screenplays, directing, producing or acting. Says he: "I'm more analytic than creative. My main interest is batting out shapely prose that will inform the reader...
Sometimes Phillips is almost willful in her virtuosity, and sometimes she is borne along too easily on waves of rhythmic prose. Nevertheless, her range is considerably greater than is common among her despair-addicted contemporaries, as is her fugitive grace. Where Ann Beattie's characters, for instance, are habitually on Valium, Phillips' are generally on speed; while Beattie's have surrendered to nothingness, Phillips' are still in search of something. Nearly all the stories in Fast Lanes are, like their characters, fascinated with gymnasts, tightrope walkers and others who find ways to steady and ground themselves. And the best...
...these customers is Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft), a free-spirited New York script reader forever on the lookout for classic volumes of poetry and prose at affordable prices. One day she comes across an advertisement for Marks and Co. in the Saturday Review, and pens the first letter of what will become a two-decade-long correspondence between herself and the various employees of Marks...
Almost at the End demonstrates why. A collection of prose and poetry, the book is nicely timed with the reappearance of Yevtushenko, 53, as a prominent spokesman for Gorbachev's liberalization campaign. The new work is theatrical but tame. The targets are either old monsters or the class of unreconstructed bureaucrats whom the new regime has pledged to replace. The daring urgency of earlier poems, such as The Heirs of Stalin and Babi Yar, has given way to all- purpose indictments of totalitarianism and effusions of universality. "I ; would like to be born in every country,/ have a passport...