Word: witting
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...view, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a genius with a powerful physical presence. His foresight, combined with a generous, romantic spirit, made him irresistible to women and children and, indeed, to much of the reading public. Rebecca West, by contrast, was a woman of sharp beauty, "wit, acute observation . . . and a wild paranoia." Through the ten years of their romance, she tells friends of various humiliations: Wells ignores her, he suffers from fits of maniacal rage, he becomes childishly dependent. But the author says, "I cannot believe a word . . . they are inventions," and then goes on to document "what...
...dialogues in a Harold Pinter play are pitched battles between speech and silence. The speaker marshals all the resources of colloquial language-wit, wheedling, anecdote, abuse-while the listener waits out his opponent and, often as not, wins the battle by withholding approval, by being as silent as God. Such, too, is the uneasy symbiosis of Playwright Pinter and his audience. In these three short plays that Alan Schneider has mounted off-Broadway (two of them first performed at London's National Theater in 1982, the third earlier this year), Pinter dramatizes this relationship through three memorable audience surrogates...
...lectures on "Being a Woman Writer: Paradoxes and Dilemmas"; on "The Curse of Eve, or What I Learned in School"; on witches; and the lively tour de force which ends the volume, "Writing the Male Character." In these lectures, several of them first delivered at Harvard, Atwood's piercing wit, her incisive dissection of the pitfalls of male-female relations, and her considerable erudition all come together...
Memoirs of movie actresses are expected to be long on gossip, short on wit and veracity, and inferior in humility to the autobiographies of deposed presidential aides. They are also expected to be ghostwritten, or catered: you call the service, and they do the book. So much for expectations. Candice Bergen's account of her first 38 years not only is handwritten, it is one of the better books of the season so far: a shrewd, funny, loving and sometimes appalling account of how it felt to grow up in a family that was singular even in Hollywood...
Because all these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Hemenway, 62, provides one of the most difficult cases in modern American writing. The author's talent is unquestionable. His first collection showed fluency and wit; its title story, The Girl Who Sang with the Beatles, won the O. Henry Award in 1970. At the Border is Hemenway's first published work since that impressive debut...