Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Personals thrusts the reader into a whirlwind of activity; amid the confessions and recollections, one enters the life of every one of the writers, knows each of them intimately, faces their problems and rejoices at the resolutions. Gathering the novel together, Thomas Beller asked each writer to write a story about something that matters to them. The result: a wide-ranging account of contemporary life. Almost as impressive as the sheer variety of topics and the sincerity with which they are presented, is the range of writing styles used to illustrate the points of the essays...
Writing about being a virgin at 25, one woman helps the reader feel to what extent her virginity has controlled her life by filling her essay with passion. Another contributor, also writing about losing control of his life, he with the help of heroin, allows himself to take a tone that is cooler and more detached because his experience is more commonly expressed and understood. A black writer, examining the conflict he feels between his race and his middle class upbringing, writes his essay largely in the second person, thereby splitting himself in two so as to allow...
...school, presumably because of more adult attention. He cites research, some of it a bit woozy-sounding, asserting that "only children show more interest in science, music, math and literature, while kids with siblings care more for...mechanical and technical work, skilled trades, and labor." Yeah, yeah, thinks the reader, concluding (as does McKibben, in fact) that only children are a lot like the rest of us. If your kid has no sibs, don't fret...
Film-noir fans quickly spotted the similarities between the Kimeses and the mother-and-son team of con artists in The Grifters, the 1990 movie starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. But any reader of dime-store detective novels knows that true grifters take their haul by trickery, not violence. When the police investigation is over, the Kimeses may be known by a less exotic word in the criminal lexicon: murderers...
...Harding's friend Carrie Phillips, trysted with a female Senate aide, ogled nude, frolicking teenage girls on a farm in Ohio, and sired two illegitimate children--one of them conceived in his Senate office with a woman 32 years his junior. It is with some amusement, then, that the reader at this point in the book finds a chapter titled "Women." Perhaps Anthony ran out of heading ideas, having already trotted out "Adultery Again," "Betrayal and Confrontation" and "Lust...