Word: proses
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...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...
...customer at Politics & Prose, a busy bookstore in Chevy Chase, Md., is mightily perplexed. There is this book, she tells the manager, something about the impending economic disaster, written by a Chinese. At most chain bookstores, the personnel might be equally baffled. But the staffer at Politics & Prose thinks for a moment, and then, from among the shop's 20,000 titles, quickly produces a copy of The Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra -- not a Chinese, to be sure, but the right book nonetheless. Sold...
...style is Leibowitz's rationale for this book, then it seems an unfortunate consequence the turgid, academic prose he has chosen to express his own. Between the pages of plot summary, the endless intellectual bragging and the almost repetitive invocations of some nebulous American national "identity," Fabricating Lives gets lost in its own pretentiousness...
Minimalists trying to imitate the pin-drop prose of the late Raymond Carver would consider Banks' style uncool. But judging from the author's output, cool seems like a social disease. His structures lack grace but carry the weight of his passion and concern...
Dunne is not naturally introspective, which may be bad news for the self- help set but is good news for readers who like snappy prose, to say nothing of snappishness. Dunne takes particular pleasure in knocking a great American unknockable from his hometown. Katharine Hepburn, he harps, "has always seemed to me all cheekbones and opinions, and none of the opinions has ever struck me as terribly original or terribly interesting, dependent as they are on a rather parochial Hartford definition of quality, as reinterpreted by five decades' worth of Studio unit publicists." Writing well, or at least trying...