Word: fictions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Feminist, activist and author Susan Sontag last night discussed her latest piece of historical fiction, In America: A Novel, a work that she insisted is not only a story, but is a novel about storytelling...
...Fiction should] create a mental, physical, emotional world that dilates your sympathies...and [that] conveys and inculcates wisdom about our humanity," she said...
...Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert...
McCarthy was a gifted minor writer with a penetrating mind and, for all her coldness, considerable charm. She had the treacherous habit of putting real people (friends, enemies, ex-husbands), thinly disguised, into her fiction--a matter, she said, of baking real plums into an imaginary cake. Her unusual compulsion to tell the truth could also be an instrument of vicious distortion. The technique proved lucrative with The Group, her best-selling 1963 novel of her classmates at Vassar and their subsequent lives...
Quinonez knows this 'hood--readers may have to remind themselves that this is a work of fiction and not a memoir. His prose, detailed and passionate, brings the tale to life. Though operating from different moral bases, Chino and Bodega share the same dream: to make Spanish Harlem a neighborhood where moving up doesn't have to mean moving...