Word: shortly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...prose fails to redeem things. There is only one decent piece of fiction--"Mademoiselle Champignon", By Frederick Wakeman, a Harvard junior. Wakeman is sandwiched between two long short stories, the first a pallid Hemingway without irony, called "The Leedhes." It begins with twenty-one simple sentences, stumbles along under a clock of belabored symbolism, and never quite gets on its feet again. C. C. Abt returns in the other effort to tell a long tale inadequately...
...eyes belong to a short, unshaven, portly young man with a Saragossa shock of black hair, a pair of plaid suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, and the look of John L. Lewis with a beer bottle benignancy. His shoe-soles are worn to a sharp angle and he occasionally scratches...
...more rounds and part of a third, they fought without faltering through such helter-spellers as recalesce, baccivorous and jardiniere. Then Jolitta, hearing dissyllabic correctly pronounced with a short i in the first syllable, asked if it could be pronounced "dye . . ." That pronunciation was wrong, but she was told to go ahead. When she misspelled the word (only one s). judges decided that she had been misled. Jolitta was allowed to try Quincunx. She spelled it, and, in spite of protests from Pittsburgh Pressman Joe Williams, Tina's escort, the deadlock continued...
Shirley Ann Grau's first book of short stories, The Black Prince (TIME, Jan. 24, 1955), was so good that many readers have been impatiently waiting for the first of the "even dozen" novels she hoped to write. But having written the first one, she discarded it. The Hard Blue Sky is her second, and while it is not for the wastebasket, it is additional proof that Author Grau is a born short-story writer. She could make the ordinary Negroes and whites of The Black Prince seem special and even important. But in nearly 500 pages...
Life on Isle aux Chiens flows along endlessly, and she leaves it just where she found it. It is a pity that Author Grau did not wrap up the island in one of her fine short stories that have the knack of checking a perpetual flow and explaining its course...