Word: yarn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brunvand has catalogued dozens of local happenings that somehow seemed to happen in different localities all over the country, yarns that are probably untrue but widely retold. There is, for instance, the story of the old woman who, whenever her dog or cat got wet, would dry it off in the oven. Then her children bought her a microwave, with gruesome consequences. Perhaps the most popular American folk yarn, the "vanishing hitchhiker," has been around for decades (centuries, if you count the version in Acts 8: 26-39). It has been updated for the automobile age. A driver picks...
...Henry Miller, S.J. Perelman and Walt Whitman had holed up in a Michigan roadhouse to concoct a mystery yarn, the resulting melange of cosmic erotica, snappish humor and hirsute lyricism might resemble this send-up of the "tecs" by Poet and Novelist Jim Harrison (Farmer, Legends of the Fall). His mock hero, Johnny Lundgren, nicknamed Warlock, is a reluctant Swedish-American gumshoe who has been fired from his job as a foundation executive. He flees to the comforting semi-poverty of rural northern Michigan where irrelevance turns to comic Scandinavian angst. Trysts in his overheated Subaru prove difficult; his forays...
DIED. Alec Waugh, 83, author of more than 50 novels (A Spy in the Family), biographies (The Lipton Story) and travel books (The Sugar Islands) who labored for years in the shadow of his better-known brother Evelyn, until the publication in 1956 of his bestselling yarn of interracial love and intrigue in the Caribbean, Island in the Sun; in Tampa...
...begins this loopy yarn, set in the misty, myth-ridden hills and bogs of County Donegal, northwest Ireland. Once his victim is buried deep in the peat, Roarty begins to receive demanding notes from "Bogmailer."The mystery meanders with Irish indirection to a surprising last-minute plot twist, employing a cast of tavern regulars that Flann O'Brien or Dylan Thomas would have stood to a round...
Told through a combination of straight narrative and excerpts from imaginary histories and journals, God Emperor is a cautionary yarn about the messianic ego and an uncritical faith in technology. The book also harbors a cynical view of politics. Some musings from the worm who would be god: "Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat." Some of Leto's decrees are variations on the Old Testament. Dune's religion, for example, outlaws computers as graven im ages of the mind. Throughout, his observations...