Word: shortness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tantalizing. The company still has its 16% interest in Goodrich, but all it has to show so far for that is a sizable paper loss. Legal fees and other campaign costs drained away another $3 million. A strike at Northwest's Lone Star Steel Co. and continuing problems-short hauls, frustrated merger plans-at its Chicago & North Western Railway have also helped to cripple profits. In the first nine months of the year, pretax earnings fell to $11.6 million-a 72% decline...
...heard of him until a decade ago. Today, especially among the literate young, he is recognized all over the world as a brilliant, exotic and curiously endearing literary figure. Borges is a poet as well as a prose master. But his most characteristic creations are unique short stories, which he calls ficciones. They can be unmistakably identified by their brevity, clear, laconic style, humor, and dependency on such devices as mazes, mirrors, odd beasts, and men who are really other men. In short, they deal in one way or another with the conundrums of art and identity, the treacherous nature...
...wrote poetry and essays for avant-garde journals, and edited anthologies of Argentine literature, including a book of detective stories. But it was not until the late '30s that Borges wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of the first and perhaps best known of his short fictions...
Like the subsequent stories brought out under the title Ficciones, the short story Tlön is a form of metaphysical bemusement. In Tlön, a whole new planet is willed into being by a group of scientists, artists and philosophers. One of the instruments of the creation is an encyclopedia that they compile to cover every aspect of Tlön's existence. The entries and extrapolations are so logical and convincing that Tlönian artifacts start showing up on Earth...
...make him endearing in person. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. "Beside real short story writers," he says, "my stories hardly exist." Then he adds an overly modest bit of self-appraisal: "As Latin American writers go, perhaps they...