Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...messes, she made some memorable movies, including Gilda and Miss Sadie Thompson. But the final years were awful. She abandoned her last film role in 1972. Eight years later, she was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease, and Yasmin cared for her until her death in 1987. Leaming's prose can gush ("the incomparable Hermes Pan," "the fabulous Eartha Kitt") and regularly descends to write-by-the-numbers cliche. But the material is poignant, another reminder of the chasm that can exist between public images and private pain...
...usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that...
...tone of the title -- both grandiose and self-mocking -- accurately reflects the contents. Julian Barnes, whose third novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1985), earned an army of readers outside his native Britain, has here gathered a collection of prose pieces, nominally fiction, that cohere chiefly by virtue of being bound together in one book. The affair kicks off with a termite's view of the adventures of Noah and his ark. (Noah, it turns out, was not a particularly nice fellow, and his epic voyage was less than heroic in its details.) Matters then proceed through a number of other diverting...
...sake of balance, I must report that many clips in my ego folder are unexceptionable. National Review, for instance, recently hollered indignantly about the tilt of something I'd written. Fair enough; my prose was quoted accurately. Still other stories are both factually correct and somewhere between benign and laudatory. (These will be suitably framed and hung on my office wall as soon as time permits.) But there are enough unalloyed clinkers in this little collection to raise disturbing questions. If Washingtonian didn't get my pay right, how many other numbers in that story were wrong...
...editor of the gray-tinged daily Pravda, Afanasyev, 66, has been less than eager to rush into print any of the startling revelations or investigative spadework that has become the hallmark of glasnost. On the other hand, Starkov, 50, oversees the weekly tabloid Argumenty i Fakty, whose sharp prose and readers' letters more often than not dwell on the changes sweeping the country, and helped make the paper the most widely read in the Soviet Union. Yet last week both men faced pressures far worse than those posed by deadlines: Afanasyev was summarily fired from his job and Starkov...