Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Compared with the sound-bite sparring on the nightly news, the 90-minute Wake Forest wordfest may seem like an advanced policy seminar. But the rigid format allows both men to get away with programmed answers and pretested prose. How can you get a sense of the real candidates lurking behind the campaign consultants? Ignore the mock theatrics and instead focus on those unscripted moments that provide a glimpse of how the two men think and react. Use this Spontaneity Scorecard to decide who best displays his fitness to be President, not guest host on the Johnny Carson show...
...troubles, many self-inflicted. By the time her Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, she had long since fallen silent as a fiction writer and would remain so right up to her death, at 63, in 1979. David Roberts' workmanlike biography generously quotes Stafford's inimitable prose voice -- elegant, tough, mordantly funny. It is a voice that is sadly neglected in today's literary scene...
...tries to make that separation, and how he stumbles into his own path to sanctity, is Powers' story. He tells it in prose that is like his hero: unspectacular but full of impressive resources. Powers commands a variety of comic voices, from the wild, imaginary conversations with the Archbishop, or Arch, as Joe calls him, to the non sequiturs of sweet, dim Father Felix, the monk who helps Joe out on weekends when he is not chuckling over TV shows. The scenes in which Joe falls woefully short of his ideal of priestly fellowship are wicked social comedy. For days...
...four big league ballplayers who are older than I am. By daring to stop time for at least one more summer, these final four have become my personal antidotes to middle age, even as I chart their downward slide in the arithmetic of the box scores and the formulaic prose of the sporting pages...
...confusion is understandable. While "Errand" is full of Chekhovian touches--surprises delivered in a complete prose deadpan, methodically thorough detail, small paradoxical moments that reveal character--the touches sound contrived and unnatural in Carver's hands. If "Errand" were akin to Harold Bloom's apophrades, a return from the dead of an old literary influence, the styles of Carver and Chekhov would merge without seams. Instead they...