Word: wondered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When you flip through the highly polished pages of The New Yorker, you sometimes wonder whether a writer's facility leads you to forget that he has nothing to say. So, too, when you see a slickly-staged job of Shadow of a Gunman, you wonder whether Sean O'Casey invokes the world's enduring sentimentality for the Irish to obscure the fact that he dwells on an incident that seems trivial, an incident that is sadly pale when set beside the heroic achievements in human terror of which people have proven themselves so capable...
...Lobster. While Crabbe is doomed to have a bad time with publishers, Author Rolfe clearly had a wonderful time writing about them, and British Bibliographer Cecil Woolf, in his introduction, provides a convenient Who's Who. Grant Richards, publisher of such authors as Shaw and Housman, appears in the novel as Doron Oldcastle, "an ostentatious tyrannical turpilucricupidous half-licked pragmatic provincial bumpkin." Publisher John Lane, who published works by Anatole France, Ernest Dowson and Francis Thompson, is seen as Slim Schelm, "a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer." Oldcastle commissions...
...wonder is that a man as patently mad as Rolfe should have been sane enough to write Crabbe's story. He saw himself, not as others saw him, but, worse, as he saw others. Yet a strong echo of religious faith and a capacity for lacerating laughter relieve the baleful monomania of his vision...
...Pirandelphic yarn in which characters search out the author and argue their rights and reality. The Wine of Paris presents a mad alcoholic, a most happy fella who thinks that other people are bottles of wine. With its cork-popping wit and full-bodied bouquet of pain, joy and wonder, Across Paris is vintage Ayme from a small but peerless literary vineyard...
...good ladies of Richmond adopted Edgar and his illegitimate sister Rosalie. Edgar fell to the childless wife of a tobacco and drygoods merchant, part-time slave trader and fulltime hypocrite named John Allan. No wonder Poe was addicted to changeling fantasies of noble descent. From being a backstage baby practically weaned on gin, he became "Master Allan," was educated at school in England and sent to the University of Virginia (after less than a year he left, in disgrace and in debt...