Word: swans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chosen just one Telemundo tale for development, Body of Desire, and tapped as executive producer Nely Galán, a TV veteran in both Spanish and English whose most recent hit was the Fox plastic surgery--reality TV spectacle The Swan. Body of Desire spins the story of a wealthy man married to a beautiful woman; the man dies and is reincarnated in the body of a laborer, only to find that all the people in his former life are phonies. The supernatural twist, Richard says, will appeal to viewers hooked on shows like Medium...
...Black Swan Green (Random House; 294 pages), the most prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer in Britain brings his formidable gifts very close to home. In his first novel, Ghostwritten, in 1999, David Mitchell, now 37, invented the planetary novel, in a way, by setting nine stories in eight countries and describing a single spirit that ran through them all like a fuse. In his third novel, 2004's Cloud Atlas, he turned the postmodern book inside out by setting pieces in six different ages and voices, then doubling back (a little too fancily perhaps) to explore the idea...
...Black Swan Green tells the story of 13-year-old Jason in 13 chapters, one for every month of 1982 (plus one for January 1983), and describes an archetypal striver, rendered lonely and vulnerable by his sensitivity and terrified of bullies, girls and his inability to say words beginning with s and n. His family is coming apart, he somehow senses, as is the country around him (it's the year of the Falklands War and Maggie Thatcher's unexpected revolution). One part of him leans toward knowingness, but the rest is mired in a child's supercharged universe...
...Black Swan Green proceeds (more in the manner of a scrapbook than a thriller) through the seasons of the year, and then, exactly at the midpoint of the novel, Jason stumbles upon an exotic old lady--a Belgian Miss Havisham--who throws open the doors on an alien world of poetry and music and Continental panache (everything forbidden to an English boy). Madame Crommelynck also starts to comment on what we have been reading, asserting that "Beautiful words ruin your poetry" and "A poet throws all but truth in the cellar." Suddenly, as in the works of Thomas Pynchon...
...White House press secretary Scott McClellan said after getting off the plane, "It was an emotional day. This was his swan-song trip...