Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ONLY CHILD (Columbia; $6.98). In the preholiday avalanche of LPs by major music acts, this attractive album might be overlooked. Using the standard country music themes of loneliness, moving around and adultery, Jans writes in the restless, romantic vein of a young man. Out of Hand, his tale of a hard-lovin' man who meets his match, unfolds against twanging guitars and the gentle percussion of a rural roadhouse band...
...America, are places where the past is intricately woven into the present--Helprin's range includes France, Russia, Israel, Italy, and Jamaica--and they provide both a framework and a source of inspiration for his overriding aim: to uncover the link between, the modern short story and the oral tale of long ago. This book, his first collection of short stories, is his attempt to give to the written form of the story--a finite, completed form, not open to change--the feeling of a story which has been expanded and embroidered by generations of retelling...
...three or four serious, romantic songs that sneak in are a little jarring--you're kind of waiting for the punch line and feel silly when it doesn't come. But these numbers are all so good in themselves--particularly John Spritz's "Out There," a sad and realistic tale of two people who should get together but just miss the connection--that they deserve to be included...
Perhaps no one but Naipaul has the inside and outside knowledge to have turned such a dispirited tale into so gripping a book. His island is built entirely of vivid descriptions and offhand dialogue. At the end, it has assumed a political and economic history, a geography and a population of doomed, selfish souls. Partisans of all stripes will argue that Naipaul has maligned their ideologies: not all revolutionary leaders are pathological perverts, not all benevolent whites are deluded do-gooders. These cavils are as irrelevant as they are true. Guerrillas is not a polemic (polemicists will be annoyed...
...working in the garden. Someone holds up a piece of our all-too-tenacious ivy and cries "Watch out Fred, here it comes again!" My dog announces his wish to re-enter the house. "I hear a seal bark," my father says. Friends of mine have told the tale of family dinners wherein the conversation consisted of just one cartoon caption after another--punctuated, always, by uncontrollable laughter...