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Rabbit at Rest
by Updike, John
John Updike's finest hour.
His best work, and there's a lot of it, has given him an indelible place in our American letters. He is one of our literary masters and Rabbit at Rest is where he is at the peak of his powers. |
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Come Back to Sorrento
by Powell, Dawn
Grand Delusion
Dawn Powell's Come Back to Sorrento faces some bitter truths. |
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The Cat
by Colette
Flesh and Its Secrets
Colette's The Cat shows her distinctive mastery. |
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Herzog
by Bellow, Saul
Herzog at 40: Saul Bellow's last great work
I thought of these two Bellows when I read Herzog, his last great novel. It is a stylistic tour de force brimming with Joycean riffs and brilliant intensity. |
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One Writer's Beginnings
by Welty, Eudora
Eudora's gift
In her brilliant short story collections, A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net , The Golden Apples and the Bride of The Innisfallen, Welty cuts bias, pretense and prosaic flash to create fictional worlds so real and so clear that her act of creation has a certain art to it. |
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The Good Soldier
by Ford, Madox Ford
Betrayal
The regularly re-discovered The Good Soldier is a novelist's novel. |
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Ravishing of Lol Stein, The
by Duras, Marguerite
Voyeur, Mon Amour
The Ravishing of Lol Stein is one of Marguerite Duras' most affecting novels. |
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What Maisie Knew
by James, Henry
Portrait of a Child
Henry James' What Maisie Knew comes through as one of his best novels |
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Writing Was Everything
by Kazin, Alfred
When books mattered to more people
Kazin strikes me as a very engaging mandarin, eager to share some of his experiences of writers and writings with the Harvard students who attended these lectures and later readers of the published texts. |
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Our Lady of the Flowers
by Genet, Jean
Pricks and Arrows
Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers still has the power to arouse and disturb. |
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