Word: reader
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...relationships in a tiny California college, while the second is a novel in motion, sprawling over the whole Southwest and Mexico. But each of these divergent books works a similar splendid change on one of the shopworn tricks of the mystery trade, the revelation of guilt which confutes the reader's expectations. MacDonald transforms a mechanical gimmick into a genuinely horrifying reversal, in each case significant, completely unexpected, and carefully prepared. A reader finds such glimpses of horror throughout the Archer books, and just as often he feels the disturbing stab of empathy with a murderer which MacDonald evokes...
...CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. This brilliant, brooding "meditation on history" takes the reader into the heart of the Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion...
...novel is highly complicated, though there is consistency within the fantasy. He has succeeded in bringing the fear endemic to life under Stalin to a level where it can be borne-as excruciating comedy. Yet, while entertained by the absurd carryings-on of the Devil in Moscow, the reader is also made aware that grave matters of eternal importance are being decided behind the showy fireworks...
...those rarities in American letters-the completely rounded writer, capable of handling the counterpoint that this theme necessitates. If his method is kitchen realism (down to the whirring refrigerator), his manner is as fine as the tinkle of dining room crystal. He does not try to bomb the reader out of his mind, nor is he out to revolutionize his conscience. Rather, he tells a story with grace and wit, taking the common-or universal-experiences of life as the basis for a work that readers not only can understand but can use to understand each other...
...Wadham College, Sir Maurice Bowra seems to have spent a lifetime as a classical scholar preparing to write his memoirs. His sentences, too many of them balanced on a median "and," move at the stately pace of an Oxford processional. His assurance is majestic. It assumes that the reader will want to hear everything about him, from his encounter with the novelist Henry James, who asked politely if the young Bowra were still at school ("I replied that I was") to the disposition of a fellow don's remains: "When Frederic Harrison died, he left us his ashes, together...