Word: unreality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...post-Hiroshima anthology selections written by students are mostly imitations of these people. Culler, in his introduction, makes much of the polished, professional techniques of these contemporary writers; they are professional, I guess, because they don't use much punctuation and their characters have unreal names like Cherub and Pixie...
...slightly amazed when I met my fellow trainees for the Peace Corps "R.C.A." program in Sierra Leone thought that I would be working with computers or television sets before I learned the initials meant ("rural community action")--Carpenters, masons, geologists, an people you read about in books, unreal people, people who can (shudder) do things...
...early days of the dispute, Crane consciously sought to destroy the power arrayed against him--the five anti-Curry votes--by demonstrating that it was, in essence, unreal. First came the mayor's election, when he attempted, it seems, to prolong the deadlocked balloting. The longer the delay, the more time there would be to work behind the scenes to shatter the majority. But the mayor's election was resolved in only a week; and with a victory for the anti-Curry forces, the dispute moved out into the open...
From the beginning, everything seems unreal. We meet the most important characters on a small freighter bound for Port-au-Prince from New York. But instead of escaping into fantasy, we are immersed in one of those old movies about a group of wildly disparate travelers locked together in a tight situation. For the people are plausible only as creations of a novelist at the end of his rope, searching for something to add zest to his book. A 1948 Presidential candidate on the Vegetarian ticket and his stiff-upper-lipped wife; a mysterious adventurer, escaping from Philadelphia; a Negro...
...unreal characters aren't enough to make a book this dull. After all, we do care about the vegetarians enough to cringe mildly for them. And a few of the other characters are interesting, too: the little criminal, who is always making up stories about himself and planning great escapades which invariably fail, or the Haitian doctor, a gentle, philosophical communist. And there's not nearly enough about the narrator's mother, who writes to her Haitian lover: "Marcel, I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending...