Word: fictions
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This book takes no text; it employs no plot to give it body, no characters to give it blood and spirit. Its subject is the continent of Africa; and its strangeness proves once more the truth of an ancient apothegm concerning truth and fiction. Written in the manner of a novel and cast in the pattern of a travelogue, it belongs to that obscure hinterland of literature that W. H. Hudson visited in Green Mansions and Defoe, to a certain extent, in Robinson Crusoe...
...literary allusion. For instance: "Do you remember Joe, the fat boy at whom Mr. Wardle was always shouting 'Joe! Damn that boy, he's asleep again'? Joe had an overpowering predilection for meat pies and mutton and roast beef. He is a humorous character, in fiction. In real life, he would be Tragedy personified, because Joe was the victim of chronic poisoning...
...papers. We have newsboys in Balti more -hustling kids with voices as loud as and with car-hopping agility equal to those of any other city. But . ". . carrier circulation is the back bone of the Sunpapers-delivery directly into the home, not by the glorified newsboy of fiction, but by exclusive carriers, supervised by members of the Sun Route Owners Association, responsible business men who can glorify themselves after working hours and pay a good tailor for the glorification...
...combination of a discussion of crime with a literary style is rare in fiction and almost unknown outside of it; and it has remained for Mr. Pearson to discover that genuine murders, as distinguished from 'detective stories, are capable of a reflective and entertaining treatment. Here he has presented accounts of five historic American murders, beginning with the Borden case in Fall River, and including the engrossing story of the murders on the barkentine Herbert Fuller−an astonishing marine piece which outdoes Clark Russell and in some points is suggestive of a situation used by Conrad in Chance...
...like a 'detective story. They lack, for one thing, the neat solution at the end; in only one of the cases was the mystery solved beyond any possibility of doubt and in the Borden case it was never solved at all. In that respect fact gains somewhat over fiction; it gains also in Mr. Pearson's method of presentation. Like Lizzie Borden, he does not "do things in a hurry." His entirely healthy interest in his subject has a gently philosophic turn, he builds up his backgrounds like an artistic social historian, and there is a wealth...