Word: boye
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Vikram Seth had a problem. The Calcutta-born, London-based author had exploded onto the literary scene in 1986 with The Golden Gate, a novel in verse set in California. His 1993 Indian saga A Suitable Boy - at nearly 1,400 pages the longest work of fiction in English since the 18th century - sold a million copies in Britain alone. Then came some poems, an opera libretto and ? nothing. "You don't know exactly what to write about next," Seth's mother, visiting from India, told him in 1994. "Why don't you write about him?" She was referring...
...dead," writes Link in The Great Divorce. One of current fiction's little-known treasures, she spins her stories in such charming, matter-of-fact tones that you almost don't realize you're entering a hybrid world that's part Muggle and part magic. A love-befuddled boy talks to a character from his favorite TV show on the phone. A late-night convenience store is visited by zombies who refuse to buy anything. An entire village pulls up stakes and moves itself inside a handbag made of the skin of a dog. Link casts her spells like...
Whimsical and yet elegantly stark, Bender's narratives resonate like fables. A man encounters a colony of pocket-size people living alongside humans. A woman harvests children from a crop of potatoes. A boy born with keys on his hands instead of fingers spends his life looking for things (doors, security boxes, women) to unlock. Bender ensnares you with an enticing opening line--"The pumpkinhead couple got married"--and confidently leads you into her phantasmagoric realm from there. Thankfully she stops short of fairy-tale morals; in their place we're given sublime studies on sorrow, grief, kindness and love...
Heaven is the sweet punch line man has created for the end of his lifelong joke. To the interview subjects in Diane Keaton's documentary, it is even more. One of them says earnestly all people in heaven will be white, and a boy declares that you'll walk on cotton balls and eat pale food like marshmallows. And when you have sex in heaven, the offspring must be "little dead people," because you have to be gone to get there. A Salvation Army officer describes death as being "promoted to glory." Reunited with their life's loves, the elect...
After some patchy times and a couple near misses with record companies, McGuinness struck a deal with Island in 1980 that allowed an unusual amount of creative independence ("They had to accept the record without any question"), and the band released its first album, Boy. That same year, it paid its first visit to America, opening in Boston for a band of what Bono calls "some local renown. We started to play, and all the people started standing up, turning over the tables. The place was packed. Steam was dripping off the ceilings, and they wouldn't let us leave...