Word: afterword
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beedle is, as advertised in Deathly Hallows, a small book - 111 pages, and that's with an introduction, an afterword, triple spacing and margins into which you could fit a Hungarian Horntail. None of the stories in it are bad - I don't think J.K. Rowling knows how to be less than charming in print - but they do vary in quality. The first tale, "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot," is the worst, a grimly heartwarming trifle about how you should be nice to Muggles. "Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump," a variant on the emperor's new clothes...
...afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov astutely observed that "reality" is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." He was arguing that any event is channeled, distorted, enriched by our perspective--that there's no objective reality, really. Nabokov was writing in 1956, just before the film form called cinema verité proved that even truth-seeking documentaries could have a social agenda and decades before shows like The Real World, Survivor and Big Brother made "reality TV" a phrase that is meaningless without sarcasm. Today, with reality programs using scriptwriters and dramas going for that realistic shaky...
...Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that one of the subjects taboo to American publishers was that of "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." New Line, having invested something like $180 million in The Golden Compass, is similarly scared of its antireligious content. The company that boldly greenlighted Peter Jackson's $300 million Hobbit ambitions before a frame of the first movie was shot, and made billions from riding that risk, hasn't said yes to films two and three of the Pullman books - although...
...analyze and critique: the disappearance of the vernacular, the spreading of homogeneous suburbs and corporations, and, finally, the decaying inner cities left behind. Empty shop windows, Levittowns, and boarded-up apartment buildings tell the story. According to William L. Fox, the author of the first essay appearing in the afterword, the inner city is ruinous and local businesses are disappearing as a direct consequence of the spread of suburbia. As the tax base rushes to new localities in the hope of peace and quiet, they leave no incentive for investment in the core of the city. As America has slowly...
...orthodoxy shouldn't be surprising, for two reasons. One, Rice notes in an afterword that since 1998 she has been a passionate Catholic. And two, it was Rice's profound earnestness, her unwinking commitment to the material, that brought such power to her handling of vampires (who, like Jesus, one could argue, are beings of a dual, quasi-human nature). At the time vampires were in danger of sliding into camp, and they needed her earnestness. Jesus, not quite so much...