Word: short
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recalls those of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfulfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue. What one learns of the man suggests that John F. Kennedy Jr. led a very good life indeed, and if one calls his death untimely, it means only that...
...about Japan. The most popular is that the country finally has the kind of policy guidance it needs to get turned around. That leadership takes a variety of forms. The Bank of Japan, for instance, has been telegraphing with very un-Greenspan-like candor that it intends to keep short-term interest rates near zero. At the same time, an encouraging amount of "micro-reform" is under way in Japan--tiny revolutions in entrepreneurial companies that may forge a Japan built for the Internet age. As some Japanese like to observe, they spent 40 years building the world's best...
Every decade or so someone, somewhere, proclaims short fiction irrelevant and passe. In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century, out last spring, John Updike lamented the diminished importance of the genre during his lifetime, adding later, in an interview with Amazon.com that Americans turn to celebrity anecdotes instead for narrative lessons on how we live. "In a way," Updike reflected, "you could argue that the National Enquirer is the real successor to Story magazine...
...York Times best-seller list. Another spring collection, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, by 29-year-old Nathan Englander, has also done very well, placing among Amazon.com's top books. Older, more established writers have had luck too. Annie Proulx's newest collection of strikingly uncommercial short stories, Close Range, has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Scribner, the book's publisher, would have considered half that number a success. And at Knopf, senior editor Anne Close says short-story collections such as Lorrie Moore's Birds of America have fared very well this year...
This summer brings the release of more than half a dozen new short-story collections by young, promising writers. In the past three decades, short stories have increasingly become the province of female authors; a number of these new voices belong to women who bring a kind of outre comedy to subjects of domestic entanglement...