Word: twains
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...eighth novel, Mr. Vertigo (Viking; 293 pages; $21.95), Auster again dips into the collective memory bank, offering a hero-narrator made up in part of Twain, Horatio Alger and the Dead End Kids. Walter Claireborne Rawley first appears as a nine-year-old St. Louis street urchin in 1924. Jaded beyond his years, with a side-of-the-mouth style of flip talk ("Well, shave my tonsils"), Walt recalls meeting the mysterious Master Yehudi, the man who would change his life: "We were standing in front of the Paradise Cafe, a slick downtown gin mill." "You're no better than...
...compares electronic bulletin boards with the "scribblers' compacts" of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which members passed letters from hand to hand, adding a little more at each turn. David Sewell, an associate editor at the University of Arizona, likens netwriting to the literary scene Mark Twain discovered in San Francisco in the 1860s, "when people were reinventing journalism by grafting it onto the tall-tale folk tradition." Others hark back to Tom Paine and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers, or even to the Elizabethan era, when, thanks to Gutenberg, a generation of English writers became intoxicated with...
...tradition of satirists from Mark Twain to Salman Rushdie, Theroux updates the story of the prophet without honor in his own country. For prophet one could read writer, although the plot of this allusive entertainment gallops on its own. The style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader...
...scope of Twilight is far removed from the simplicity of one-person shows of a generation ago, mostly readings at a lectern. Sometimes the performer impersonated the author with costume and makeup, as Hal Holbrook did in evoking Mark Twain. Sometimes an actor merely read passages stirringly, as Eileen Atkins did for Virginia Woolf. Worth is now doing the same for Wharton; she just ended an entrancing off-Broadway run and has upcoming dates in Princeton, New Jersey, and at London's Royal National Theatre. "I am not remotely taking on Wharton's persona," Worth says. "I never...
...best clue to what the country might be like without race as the nail upon which American identity is hung comes from Pap, in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, who upon learning a Negro could vote in Ohio, "drawed out. I says I'll never vote ag'in." Without his glowing white mask he is not American; he is Faulkner's character Wash, in Absalom, Absalom!, who, stripped of the mask and treated like a "nigger," drives a scythe into the heart of the rich white man he has loved and served so completely...