Word: splendid
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People hankering for a peaceful, rustic existence should probably curl up with Edna O'Brien's splendid new novel Wild Decembers (Houghton Mifflin; 272 pages; $24) before moving to the sticks. Things are not as pleasant in the tiny western Irish village of Cloontha as the scenery suggests. Michael Bugler has arrived fresh from a sheep farm in Australia to claim the land left to him by a deceased uncle, and the newcomer's presence stirs up the villagers. Especially agitated is Joseph Brennan, whose ancestral farm borders Bugler's property. Brennan tries to be neighborly, but his true spirit...
...Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert...
...Ruins are typically reserved for tourists or for nobody, either ancient, splendid, worthy of a postcard or uncelebrated, accidental, vacant. The concept of "ruins for the present" is not new--Robert Smithson made a career of dropping truckloads of dirt onto houses and the like. But for all the time we spend walking around in built spaces, we rarely get to see them once they've been abandoned. Emotionally, "Crawl Space" combines the curiosity and trepidation of some kid as he pokes around a dilapidated house with a deep sense that we've already been in this house forever...
...splendid lecturer and had big enrollments," Hankins says. "He did both American and European intellectual history and that was really his great strength. He was able to bring the two together in a way that few people could...
...splendid lecturer and stand up comic and all that one needs to be to succeed as a professor," he says...