Word: reader
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Irving is so proud of his spurious account of the 13-year friendship between Hughes and Hemingway that he offers almost 20 pages of the transcript from his doomed "autobiography." In a strange way, he is justified. Even though the reader knows Irving never saw Hughes, and that the transcripts are wholly false, they sound more authentic than Irving's account of his own adventures. Hughes emerges as the tormented but rambunctious old pirate that he ought to be. Like Hans van Meergeren, who could forge Vermeers but could create nothing of much merit on his own, Novelist Irving...
...earlier puzzlements, Ellery Queen used to enjoy tweaking amateur sleuths by stopping short of the final Byzantine solution long enough to issue a "Challenge to the Reader" to match clues and wits with the smug author. In his newest novel, Stanley Ellin goes Queen one better. He offers the reader a refund instead of a contest...
...Anything that comes out of the South," the late Flannery O'Connor once observed, "is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Digging behind all the grotesque, realistic "Gone-with-the-Tobacco-Road" cliches, slowly and painstakingly detailing the ambiguous Southern actuality-this has been Robert Coles' work in progress for more than a decade. In the three volumes of his Children of Crisis series, completed earlier this year, he has documented, mostly in their own words, the destinies of families mainly...
...these themes into today's headlines for a cheap jolt of relevance. Jimmie's tale is played out against a background of incidental chatter and speculation about Australian federation, which in 1900 united the continent's six major colonies into a commonwealth. In the end the reader sees that this is not the background, but the whole point. The tragic contradictions in Jimmie's life are in fact the unresolved agonies out of which a nation is to be created...
...mankind's need to believe that the course of history and steady human progress are inevitably linked. History has not yet made clear whether such a belief is a narcotic, a noble inspiration, a necessary myth or a tragic delusion. But the author shows where any reader's sympathies must lie. Like Michelet's histories, as Edmund Wilson describes them, this book "makes us feel that we ourselves are the last chapter of the story and that the next chapter...