Word: underworlders
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...lusty creation never seems "larger than life," a cliche that underestimates the size of life. Better to say that Barney fills an expansive and unconventional existence. He is the son of Montreal's first Jewish policeman, Izzy Panofsky, who would have been at home in the old Odessa underworld. The younger Panofsky spent the early '50s in Paris, where he debauched with expats and married a crazy poet whose suicide ensured her canonization by academic feminists. What Barney calls "the true story of my wasted life" may seem undisciplined and chronologically impaired. In fact his memoir is cunningly designed...
Anthologies tend to lend themselves to filler, but not one of the stories included in The Best American Short Stories disappoints. In a year of monster tomes--Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles--this collection shows that the short story promises to outlive the long novel for good reason...
...said that the perfect crime--from start to finish--can be committed by only one person. Get others involved, the reasoning goes, and sooner or later someone will crack. Perhaps Thomas Capano, in his privileged sphere, was unaware of that underworld wisdom. Perhaps his hubris got in the way. Perhaps he never thought his own family would turn...
...detailed discussion of Ian's ultimate fate and parentage, of course, would reveal a key secret of the book. But the gentle presence of Ian, in the end, transforms Felix in the Underworld from an enjoyable if hackneyed yarn into something different and superior, a mystery novel with heart...
...months ago literary critics were busying themselves trying to invent new synonyms for epic and powerful. These efforts--putting a serious premium on thesauruses nation wide--were sparked by the appearance of Don Dellio's Underworld. In that monster tome Dellio juggles the stories of multiple historic and non-historic characters, all the while mining the existential freak-show of the later 20th century for all its tragic, ironic and surreal material...