Word: strause
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...Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative...
...Family by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, first visible as a New Yorker humorist, then as an observer in Great Plains, an elegiac portrait of the American heartland, turns reflective and inward in this long, moody rummage in time's attic. He began to gather material about his near and distant family after the death of his parents, searching, he says, for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." The journey -- perhaps more correctly his obsession -- began in 1987. Collecting family papers, dating as far back as 1855, he filed them in two boxes...
Croco'nile, written and illustrated by Roy Gerrard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15), features a huge, toothy creature that serves as a pet to a couple of Egyptian kids: "In ancient Egypt, long ago,/ Beside the River Nile,/ A brother and a sister/ Found a baby crocodile." The kids stow away on a boat: "The naughty twosome stayed concealed/ Until the break of day./ By then their little village/ Was a hundred miles away...
George Washington's Cows, written and illustrated by David Small (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15), reveals in owlish, bumpety-bump verse and vivid drawings why the great man entered politics: because his livestock drove him goobers. His cows insisted on wearing lavender gowns and being sprayed with cologne (which was quite expensive); his pigs wore wigs and served dinner to guests at Mount Vernon (very nicely too, but still ); and his sheep wore academic gowns and delivered lectures. They "measured the sea with a stick./ Then, raising their hoofs in triumph, they cried:/ 'We say with a certain amount of pride...
...first answer is that he has done something quite different and not nearly as engaging. Borderliners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 277 pages; $22) opens with a question that may seem, to most readers, groan inducing: "What is time?" The query comes from a narrator whose name is Peter (a detail he drops a third of the way through his story). Now a grown man, he looks back on himself at age 14, an orphan who, after a brief lifetime in various institutions, has unexpectedly been sent to Biehl's Academy, a prestigious school on the outskirts of Copenhagen...