Word: harshness
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...found in the 16 stories following the unfinished novel. Five have never been published, and the rest were never collected in hard covers. It is difficult to imagine why not. Malamud hit his stride early, writing stories of old men trying to preserve their dignity amid the shambles of harsh circumstances. In The Literary Life of Laban Goldman, an elderly Jew attends night school to improve his English and get away from his nagging wife; he experiences a brief moment of triumph when the Brooklyn Eagle publishes his letter to the editor urging a relaxation of New York State divorce...
Trnski's speech was the first harsh public criticism of Zhivkov, 78, who gained power shortly after Josef Stalin's death with the aid of the Soviet dictator's supporters, and ran the country in a rigid, Stalinist fashion. The attack also came during the first-ever live television broadcast of a Bulgarian Parliament session...
After this amicable standoff, and graduation, the friends part company. Later, though, the narrator finds himself thinking more and more about Saul's fascination with so-called primitive people. He wonders, in particular, about evidence that the besieged Machiguengas, dispersed into small groups by enemies and harsh conditions, retain their sense of community through a storyteller who travels wherever listeners can be found, recounting tribal legends, history and gossip. Such a person, the determined writer concludes, amounts to "tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment...
...park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched with gasoline and set afire, wolves pulled apart by horses. You can't dismember an April blizzard...
Blissful fantasy gave way to harsh reality. This was Harvard's best chance for a title in 17 years. Who knows when another chance will come along...