Word: witting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Carkeet's skill is equal to his ambition. Once again he has turned a daffy concept for a novel into a stimulating display of wit, erudition, humanity and narrative force. He weaves his diverse strands with cunning and charm and adroitly sustains suspense in what could easily have been a one-joke story. Part of his persuasive technique is an absolutely deadpan, matter-of-fact tone. Another part is the structure of the book as mystery, in which events are explained long after they happen...
Some of the stories in Back in the World are little more than personality sketches. But in the best entries, the author commands a range of styles that recall the captivating doldrums of Chekhov and the eerie menace of Paul Bowles. Wolff also demonstrates a stinging wit. An old Irish priest likes to tell his parishioners and colleagues that he does not have time to die. "One night he said it at dinner and Father Leo thought, Make time." That is a line worthy of Oscar Wilde. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...indifference is understandable. The man diagnosed himself accurately as "almost a corpse." It is miraculous that he had the wit and energy to remember, much less to create. Welch's world is barely larger than a sickroom, but its travel books intrigued some famous tourists, including Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster, who praised the author's "sensitiveness, visual and tactile." The style-struck critic Cyril Connolly described Welch's prose as ripening "like an October pear that measures every hour of sunshine against the inevitable frost...
...Buchwald is the nation's most popular political humorist because he is not too funny. Readers of his syndicated columns never have to worry about the embarrassment of laughing out loud in packed trains or at crowded lunch counters. In addition, Buchwald's wit is a comfort, not a goad. He is like a town crier assuring the citizenry of the status quo: the sheep are still in the toxic meadow, the cows in the surplus corn, the politicians reliably hypocritical and venal...
...York City premiere) is to be charmed into suspending awareness of the depressing trajectory of British life since then. The succeeding films follow that arc; they might be called 14 Perpendicular, 21 Tilt and 28 Down. Taken individually, the interviews have their flashes of cheer and wit. But in sum they suggest accommodation to life's dreary compromises at an age when one might hope for a lingering anarchic impudence. The 28-ers do not strut or rage or tease; they seem already middleaged, emotionally pinched, too cautious to hope for more. They speak Britain's defeat in every tentative...