Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...possible to argue the author. (Did Nixon, after all, have a plan, or was he simply doing what came naturally?) Much of the material, moreover as Schlesinger notes, is at least a thrice-told tale. (It is hard these days to say anything entirely new about the presidency.) But no one has followed the development of presidential power, from Truman till the present, in such authoritative detail...
...whole, pimping probably should have as little to say for itself as possible, but Paul Theroux's newest novel makes a provocative case to the contrary. Jack Flowers, an overage American drifter beached in Singapore, tells the tale: the ribald apologia of a do-gooder who makes vice the arena of his somewhat special virtue. By pandering to other people's passions, Jack figures, he has saved "many fellers from harm and many girls from brutes." As for the act itself. Jack is old-fashioned enough to assume that everyone can agree on its proper dimensions...
...brilliant The Duplex, once again serves as the focus of Bullins's work and as he skillfully juggles the novel's first and third person voices, Bullins leaves little doubt that he is Steve and that The Reluctant Rapist is his only slightly fictionalized autobiography. A picaresque tale of horror and beauty, failure and success, the novel begins with a street scene in Watts and in a series of flashbacks recalls Steve's--Bullins's life journey, a peregrination motivated by "the memory of the past, of his wasted years from where he came, from his previous trips searching...
...villains in Vietnamese history have been foreigners. In the past, Americans had no exposure to Vietnamese literature, and it was difficult to comprehend how the Vietnamese viewed the internal fabric of their society and what themes they found controversial. The best known story in Vietnam, The Tale of Kieu, by the 19th century writer Nguyen Du, recounts the plight of a girl forced to leave her home to become a prostitute in order to secure the money needed to pay for the release of her parents who had been unjustly harassed by the Imperial authorities. Huynh Sanh Tong's translation...
Some Americans who have read The Tale of Kieu in French have objected to its "unhappy" ending. Although Kieu had pledged to marry the scholar Kim Trong, she found upon her return from 15 years adrift that she could not sustain more than a platonic relationship. At the time the disaster struck Kieu's family, Kim had been performing mourning rites for a relative in a distant province for several years. Kieu's parents and her sister Van, whom she had asked to marry Kim before she left home, insisted that Kieu follow through with her marriage pledge. Kieu finally...