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CHICAGO LOOP by Paul Theroux (Random House; 196 pages; $20). With a lot more gore and a lot less talent, this novel could have shared some of the uproar that has descended on Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Here is a wealthy, morally rudderless white male stalking through a city, in this case Chicago, looking for trouble. Parker Jagoda, a successful real estate developer, has a child in the northern suburb of Evanston and a sleek, sophisticated wife who works as a professional model and periodically arranges to meet him in hotels for ritualized bouts of fantasy sex. Still, Parker...
...gratuitous descriptions of sadistic murder and mayhem ever contained in a general trade novel. Simon & Schuster decided to surrender a $300,000 advance to Ellis and not publish his book after staff protests and press stories threatened risks greater than anticipated rewards. Snapped up at a bargain price by Random House for its Vintage division, the manuscript has undergone the editorial equivalent of liposuction. It is now leaner, meaner but not better. In fact, it is worse because the disgusting parts are easier to find. No plot or characterization has been inserted to mar the originality of the work...
While the fall season features mostly games, the spring schedule is made up of tournaments, thus taking on a more "random" quality, according to Cahir, because anything can happen when three or four contests are played in a weekend...
...neighbors and cousins have disappeared." Enad al-Ban, a 24-year-old member of the resistance, said he was rounded up by the Iraqi security forces on Feb. 22 after he had finished Friday prayers at a mosque; he was one of hundreds of Kuwaitis taken almost at random by the security forces that day. "They were trying to catch any Kuwaiti they could," he said. "They put me in prison, and I was surprised to see that 3,000 others like me were also there...
...Universal Military Training prior to and during Korea. He objected to student deferments urged by many academics, politicians and college students. In his memoirs, Conant characterized deferments as "undemocratic...and would establish a privileged class." Since not every able-bodied young person was ever needed, Conant supported a random lottery "in the interests of fairness...