Word: reader
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...abstraction - who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs all his responsibilities to live adrift on a river in an open boat. There, fading from the reader's view, he seeks the spiritual dimension: the third bank of the river...
...author of three brief and bizarre novels (Trot, Seconds, The Tour), Ely commands a novelist's range of skillful settings. What he lacks is the final power to shake and shock the reader by suddenly opening a pit of darkness beneath him, or by fleetingly convincing him that things like werewolves do exist. Ely's style is too smoothly controlled for that, and perhaps the age is too secular...
...reader, the most antiquated piece of equipment in a mixed-media production, gets only the book. Barth says he originally planned to insert audio tapes in a number of hollowed-out pages, but dropped the idea as too gimmicky. There was no mention of providing each reader with a visible but silent author. Thanks mainly to Barth's enormous vitality and virtuosity, however, most of the pieces do quite well in print. Basically, Barth is firmly fixed in the Gutenberg galaxy...
...this is a book that must be judged on its own special terms. "Is Edgar Smith guilty?" Author Smith asks on the penultimate page. "If at this point the reader cannot respond with an emphatic 'yes', then I shall consider this book a success." Most readers will feel that he has raised sufficient doubts about the case, but many will wish that their response could have been more enthusiastic...
...Frayn employs the whimsy with considerable cunning, soothing the reader into a false sense of security. Creating a kind of Alice in Wonderland in reverse, he shows a powerful and peculiar imagination. Like Alice, Uncumber leaves her safe, dull, comfortable home. But where Alice retreats down a tunnel from a world of horsehair sofas and bullying grownups, Uncumber escapes onto the surface of the earth itself. Like Alice, she is both alarmed and enraptured by what she finds. Her first stunted blade of grass delights her. She sits entranced for hours, watching oily, scum-covered waves lapping at a blackened...