Word: blacking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
John Banville is an Irish writer of austere, erudite, literary novels. A Booker winner, he's famous for being relentlessly highbrow. Benjamin Black writes mystery novels; his slender, nasty The Lemur (Picador; 132 pages) appears this month. The funny thing about Black is that he and Banville are the same person...
...reduced, by ennui and a rich marriage, to writing the biography of his father-in-law, a plutocrat with a sketchy past. Glass hires a hacker to rake up some muck. The hacker rakes up so much muck that he gets himself shot neatly through the left eye. As Black tells us (at least four times, in different ways), "Everybody has secrets, mostly guilty ones...
...Black is a powerfully atmospheric writer--he is, after all, John Banville--and a champion noticer of details like a "flock of lacquered, dark brown birds" and the tanned ankles of his father-in-law. But watching him try to do what a mystery writer does shows you what's so tough about it. Good genre writers know how to express ideas and emotions through events--plot--rather than dialogue or evocative descriptions. Precious little happens in The Lemur other than Glass trading icy quips with his wife. If Benjamin Black is John Banville's guilty secret, he needs...
...Certainly it would be a big advantage to him.' CHARLIE BLACK, chief strategist for John McCain, saying a terrorist attack on U.S. soil would benefit the Republican candidate's presidential campaign; Black later apologized...
...pick a veep": try to think outside the Beltway [June 23]. I am a 57-year-old black female. We Democrats must have a white male on the ticket with Barack Obama to guarantee a win in November because this is a white man's world. I say this with no animosity. The Veep must also be smart, handsome, Southern, military and reasonably conservative. We're on a roll. Marlene B. Feltus-Jackson, NEW ORLEANS...