Word: fictions
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...best and probably the most erudite of American literary critics in this century. The question "Have you read . . .?" recurs often in his letters, and he seems to have read nearly everything: psychology, anthropology, quantum mechanics, most of English and American literature, German folklore, sports-car magazines, science-fiction pulp, the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. He was also quirky and instinctive, peppering his letters with slang like "gee" and "do-vey" (meaning good) and bursts of imagination: "I felt quite funny when Freud died, it was like having a continent disappear." Or, after a nosebleed: "I've noticed that...
...years Gaddis taught, lived on grants and wrote literature for business and industry: annual reports, speeches for executives, memorandums. In 1975 he reappeared with JR, a lengthy, knowledgeable satire about an eleven-year-old boy who becomes a corporate tycoon. JR won that year's National Book Award for Fiction, and Gaddis went back to doing whatever it is literary comets do on their elliptical journeys between publication dates...
...Fiction once provided a stomping ground for the crazed or eccentric. When the ideal of civilized behavior combined decorum and good manners, books could offer an escape into the manias of Heathcliff, Ahab and Raskolnikov, or into the stubborn individualism of Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. Heroes and heroines who would surely disrupt any public society could be avidly followed in private. But as daily life grows more clamorous and abrasive, as violence enters the home regularly by way of TV or flesh-and-blood carriers, serious fiction shows signs of moving in the opposite direction. Novels and story collections tumble...
Frederick Barthelme's third book is a textbook example of what has come to be called minimalist fiction. It does not follow that Tracer is better than the best works by Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison or Frederick's older brother Donald. They are among the most prominent writers who have experimented in various ways with the notion that in storytelling, less is both more and positively too much. But those who are curious about what the minimalists are up or down to can learn a lot by starting right here...
...awful Harvard’s social life is, it was a relief to finally see an article that reflecteed my positive experience at Harvard. Jannie S. Tsuei’s scrutiny (“Not the Only Way,” Magazine, Apr. 7) on the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA) and other groups on campus shows that there are plenty of students with active social lives, even if their schedules don’t include frat parties...