Word: writerly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than 30 years, John Updike has borne, with considerable poise and good humor, a terrible burden. He is one of those people whose prayers were answered. Growing up a beloved only child in Shillington, a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania, he dreamed of becoming a writer, of seeing his work appear on the pages of The New Yorker. And -- presto! -- these things occurred and were then followed by unanticipated consequences: lots of money, critical recognition and fame. Worse fates have befallen people, and Updike adjusted as best he could: he cashed the checks, entertained intrusive interviewers and basked modestly...
...slave names, commonly in favor of names with an African or Islamic flavor, persists. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X and then Malik al-Shabazz. Cassius Clay transformed himself into Muhammad Ali. Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture. The writer LeRoi Jones converted to Amiri Baraka...
...more than a decade in order to get a contract of roughly $1 million has now got a $1 million contract on his head. And in the same breath as he became a household name, Rushdie has become a missing person. Almost worst of all, for a writer, his work of the imagination -- and an exceptionally complex work of an uncommonly fertile imagination -- is now being treated as if it were a heretic's pamphlet; The Satanic Verses has been turned from a book into a talking point. With the drama bringing more and more readers to a novel that...
...meeting in Mecca denounced Rushdie as a "heretic and renegade" and reportedly demanded he be tried in absentia in an Islamic country, others argued that the case had been blown out of proportion. Hassan Saab, an adviser to the Sunni Muslim Grand Mufti of Lebanon, called Rushdie "an insignificant writer who has attacked a great prophet." He asked, "What harm has befallen the Prophet?" In Egypt the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque, Sheik Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq, noted that the net effect of the furor had been to increase the book's sales and profits...
Coppola's Life Without Zoe, a sort of Eloise story set at the Sherry Netherland Hotel instead of the Plaza, is the weakest entry. It occasionally says something mildly amusing about the overprivileged children of New York & City's rich and famous. But Coppola and his co-writer, who happens to be his 17-year-old daughter Sofia, cannot settle on a tone for their overplotted yarn of a Junior Ms. Fixit, working simultaneously on the cases of a poor little rich boy and her parents' wavering marriage. The Coppola team tries satire and sentiment, but the story...