Word: straus
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Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is an Indian family novel that should appeal to anyone with a taste for red-blooded American realism and farce. His narrator, Ram Karan, a corrupt inspector for the New Delhi school system, is a self-pitying moral sloth whom Mark Twain would have recognized in a Missouri minute...
What these two isolated facts have to do with each other is made resplendently luminous in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 164 pages; $30), a long narrative poem with a number of stories on its mind. One is what Walcott modestly calls his "inexact and blurred biography" of the painter Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were driven out of Portugal, who chose to practice his art in Europe rather than the raw island paradise of his birth. A parallel account involves Walcott: his boyhood fascination with the reproductions of European masterpieces he found in books...
Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well...
...what's it really about? The question arises because the author of the new novel In America (Farrar Straus Giroux; 387 pages; $26) is the formidably intelligent critic Susan Sontag. Ergo, a long story that looks like a historical romance, a celebration of a 19th century woman who, in contemporary parlance, had it all--devoted husband (a Polish count, no less), passionate younger lover and glittering career--must be hedged about with postmodern ironies, runic clues to the reader not to mistake surface for substance. Mustn...
...tiny tossees have served as human projectiles for distances exceeding 35 feet. These findings, of course, could not be confirmed and their claims are highly dubious. A toss of that magnitude woud be equivalent to tossing a dwarf from the back door of Matthews to just in front of Straus...