Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cash's tale reads like a Granite State Citizen Kane, a long, picaresque account of Loeb divorces, extramarital affairs, lawsuits, financial intrigues and editorial vendettas. Cash says that in 1946 Loeb borrowed $250,000 from his mother, the widow of Teddy Roosevelt's personal secretary, to buy into the Union Leader, but later became embroiled hi a court fight with her over use of the funds. Cash also recounts the story of the night that Loeb spent in jail on an alienation of affections charge (settled out of court, although Cash insists Loeb was guilty...
...amuse the Russians. While the rest of Europe was spawning Dante, Chaucer and Rabelais, recorded literature in Russia until the 18th century consisted mainly of sermons, lives of saints and other edifying ecclesiastical texts. The oral folk tradition in Russia was truly a magic spring. As in the fairy tale, it flowed inexhaustibly, reviving, consoling and enlightening all who partook...
Although folk tales throughout the world bear an uncanny and unexplained family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove up to his elbows in cockroach milk." Since it is axiomatic in folk tales that the more wretched a peasant, the better his chances of making good, Bukhtan naturally ends up marrying the Czar's daughter...
That encomium is immediately regarded as a trap. An old short-story writer warned Yuri about such hazards years ago, after the poet had offered compliments for a tale. "Did I write that?" the old survivor had asked. "Perhaps you shouldn't like it, and I apologize for having written it. That is, if I wrote it in the first place. And if I didn't write that story (and I'm not saying that I didn't), you shouldn't be congratulating me in a public place with dozens of people whom...
...authors turned their nightmare world into a German gothic tale: the Emperor of Atlantis (Baritone Meinard Kraak) has declared a holy war on mankind. Death, overworked, goes on strike. With no one dying, the kingdom is about to burst, and the ruler has to make a deal with Death. "We human beings cannot live without you," the Emperor says and consents to become Death's first victim if he will return...