Word: everydayness
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Jackson's whole existence is lined with insulation. His friends, many of whom are famous, help him keep life at bay and illusion near at hand: their celebrity, which complements his, also helps cast his everyday life with the living embodiments of public fantasy. "We might think his bubble world is fantastical," says one of his most sympathetic pals. "But to him it's very real. My only fear is that he'll step out and become like everybody else. He is too special the way he is. He is not immune. If he steps out of that world...
...flowing pseudonymous signature Dr. Seuss. He celebrated turning 80 last week by turning out his 42nd children's story, The Butter Battle Book (Random House; 48 pages; $6.95). An arms-race "preachment," as he calls it, the tale features no grinches, just a confrontational competition between average, everyday Yooks and Zooks who are suspicious of each other because the former prefer eating bread with the butter facing up while the latter like their butter facing down. The Yooks and Zooks devise bigger and more outrageous war machines, until each holds a Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo "filled with mysterious...
...Compromise, was published by Knopf. The tales are conspicuously devoid of the anger, overt and covert, that characterizes many émigrés' writing about their native country; Dovlatov's stories gently ridicule the obtuseness of the Soviet bureaucracy and the mendacity and corruption that invade everyday life. In The Compromise the author comically contrasts the news stories written by a Soviet journalist with what actually occurred. For example, a published report on the funeral of a high Communist Party official ("Above the open grave the solemn words of leave-taking were pronounced") is followed by an account...
...clothesbrush. Now available in Russian in the West, the book is a masterpiece of modern realism. Set in the author's native Odessa, The Courtyard tells the intermingled life stories of ten families that occupy a single tenement house. No other work of Russian fiction has portrayed the everyday life of ordinary Soviet citizens with such compassion and in such mesmerizing detail. Lvov's villain, the local party boss, and tyrant of the tenement, is as lethal to the human spirit as any hound of hell conjured up by Dostoyevsky...
...contrast, Ludmila Shtern's fictional sketches poke fun at some of the gravest problems of everyday Soviet life, including endemic food shortages and epidemic alcoholism. Shtern, 48, who taught geology in Leningrad, has combined her new writing career with selling real estate in Boston. Vastly popular with émigré readers of the Novoye Russkoye Slovo (New Russian Word) and other Russian-language publications, her fiction is beginning to break into the pages of little magazines in the U.S. such as Stories and Pequod. Back in the Soviet Union, Shtern recalls, magazine editors regularly dispensed praise along with...