Word: wizarding
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Granted, Rowling's books begin like invitations to garden-variety escapism: Ooh, Harry isn't really a poor orphan; he's actually a wealthy wizard who rides a secret train to a castle, and so on. But as they go on, you realize that while the fun stuff is pure cotton candy, the problems are very real--embarrassment, prejudice, depression, anger, poverty, death. "I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does...
Hang on--other things? It's disconcerting to think of Rowling stepping out on Harry and the gang with another set of characters. But at least we can say Harry is Rowling's last wizard. From here on out, it's Muggles only. "I think I can say categorically that I will not write another fantasy after Harry," she says, making herself and her publicists, who hover nearby, visibly nervous. "Wait, now I'm panicking. Oh, my God! Yes, I'm sure I can say that. I think I will have exhausted the possibilities of that. For me." Beyond that...
...weaves a remarkable number of narrative threads into a complex, moving and elegantly balanced whole, without any apparent effort. Rowling loves to wrong-foot readers, and the previous book, Order of the Phoenix, reads like the loins-girding preamble to an all-out, good-vs.-evil, wand-on-wand wizard war. But Half-Blood Prince turns out to be something else: an elegant, fugal tapestry in the mode of Prisoner of Azkaban. "And now," as Dumbledore says to Harry, "let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure." It's a tribute to Rowling's dramatic...
...pairing of two unpredictable inventors, who will serve as co-chairmen of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Axlon, could turn into an epic personality conflict that might make a good movie: The Wizard of Woz vs. King Pong. Right now, though, the two share the same electronic daydreams of ever smarter toys. They worked together once before, in 1974, when Bushnell hired Wozniak, then 23, to design a video game called Breakout, which became an early hit. They kept in touch over the years and started talking about the current partnership a month ago at a barbecue in the backyard of Bushnell...
...including such perennials as It's Only a Paper Moon, Last Night When We Were Young, Come Rain or Come Shine, The Man That Got Away and, perhaps most memorably, Over the Rainbow, the Academy Award-winning ballad that Judy Garland sang in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz; in New York City. Born Chaim Arluk, the son of a Buffalo cantor, he started out as a pianist and band vocalist and began writing tunes for revues and nightclubs like Harlem's Cotton Club, including I Love a Parade, I've Got the World on a String...