Word: swiftly
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...Graham Swift...
Readers who devoured Waterland a few years ago will remember finding in Graham Swift's novel an inventiveness common to many of the younger British novelists -- Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan -- matched with a sense of inquiry and of mystery that is not so common. Waterland was a novel electric with ideas. Yet in his intricate narrative of generations and degenerations, Swift achieved something remarkable: a dense, literary text that raced ahead with the compulsive fury of a page turner...
...Ever After, Swift has managed the feat again, devising a hypnotically complex examination set amid the circular staircases and false fronts of a strange man's brain. The monologist is Bill Unwin, 52, an honorary fellow of a Cambridge college who begins his tale with "These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man." Three weeks earlier, he was rescued from "attempted self-slaughter." Now, immured in his unreal world, he recalls, simultaneously, his boyhood in Paris, his discovery of the diary of a 19th century forebear, his life as the husband of an actress...
...fiendishly witty and sinuous and fluent as an Elizabethan sonnet. But at its heart is a simple, all but unanswerable question: "What is the difference between belief and make-belief?" Some readers may be exhausted by the pinwheeling frenzy of paradoxes and parallels; others, though, will be exhilarated by Swift's ability to make his terminally cerebral subject readable, and real. And they will be touched, too, by a moving breakthrough at the end that suggests Swift, unlike many of his contemporaries, really does believe that "no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling." Ever After is a supremely intelligent...
Timely delivery of the magazine to newsstands is naturally a boon to sales. Consumer marketing director David Gitow reports that each outlet displaying TIME for that extra day typically sells 20% more copies weekly. In 1991 swift delivery, coupled with a voracious public appetite for news, meant a 13% rise in newsstand sales over the prior year. During the winter months, when the gulf war was in full swing, sales skyrocketed 67% higher than the comparable period in 1990. That surge contributed to our strong overall circulation of 4.16 million...