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NW by Zadie Smith
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The 100 Best Novels. The Ten Year Reading List. The Alt Reality Nobel Prize. Contact Ted Gioia at. Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter:. Visit his web site at. Great Books Guide is an. Disclosure: This web site and its. Sister sites may receive. Promotional copies of review. Items and other materials from. Publisher, publicists and other. Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter:. Reviewed by Ted Gioia. In his 1905 book. His native land a vast hot pot—referring in particular to. Years later, a play named. This, Isaiah Berlin...
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Night Film by Marisha Pessl
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Let me describe the current state of fiction in Newtonian terms. Two large bodies are coming into a path of collision, each one. Exerting a powerful gravitation pull. The older sphere is called. Serious literary fiction' and it has long dominated this system. But the upstart, known as 'genre fiction'. Appears to have gained mass, perhaps. Even grown in size. And, most surprising. Of all, it seems to be influencing the course. Of its proud partner. Serious literary fiction. By the world of genre. Kakutani...
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The Red House by Mark Haddon
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If you want to understand trends in literary fiction, take a look at other. Forms of storytelling—videogames, motion pictures, television, graphic. Novels and the like. The cinema in particular, exerts a sometimes. Deadly influence on the novel, with the Newtonian pull of the larger. Celestial grabbing the smaller one and holding it in its orbit. This. Tendency is inevitably amplified by commercial factors: writers can. Make more money from a film adaptation. Than from the book itself, and thus often.
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
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A shrewd observer of the movie business recently confided to. Me that the new formula for the. In film is, put simply,. Ladies who kick butt. According to this way of thinking, sexy. Alone isn't enough anymore; audiences wants sexy with abs of. Steel and martial arts training. If Audrey Hepburn were starting. Out nowadays, she would need to carry a machete to the screen. Well, I must admit I've noticed a similar tendency in literary fiction. Body count on the page correlated directly with the testosterone.
conceptualfiction.com
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
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The basic plot could hardly be more familiar. A woman needs. To decide between the dashing and exciting ‘bad boy’ or settle. For the safe but unexciting ‘nice guy’. Novelists have exhausted. Almost every twist in this scenario, and adapted the story line. Over the decades in response to changing tastes and values. Of their readers. Sometimes the alluring cad turns out to have. A heart of gold (. Or the respectable, safe. Husband possesses an ugly dark. The young lady stumbles into the. Portrait of a Lady.
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
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Reviewed by Ted Gioia. How did Audrey Niffenegger manage to do it? No, I am not asking. How she managed to write such a fine novel (although. Is a fine novel). Rather, how did she manage to write. A story about time travel and keep it out of the black hole that passes. For the science fiction section of your local book store? She get to pass as an author of literary fiction, while the rest of the. Grunts are stuck in genre hell? And, most of all, how did she get the. And she did it with a first novel!
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
http://www.conceptualfiction.com/the_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy.html
Guide to the Galaxy. Essay by Ted Gioia. There are many reasons why the arbiters of literary taste have. Never warmed up to science fiction. But one of the most obvious. Is the overwrought heroic ambitions of the typical sci-fi story. The protagonists of these works are inevitably involved. In grand endeavors of galactic proportions, and no matter how. Remarkable the project at hand—whether the conquest of space. Or time or aliens with rad weapons—the. Mission accomplished banner is ready. Times, the mos...
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Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
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Back to the home page. Reviewed by Ted Gioia. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be. Lived forwards, Kierkegaard has written. Martin Amis, in. Reverses the dictum—he. Presents a life lived backwards, but capable of. Comprehension only when viewed forwards. A life told backwards possesses a. Strange, unexpected coherency. And here is the strangest part: it. Seems to follow the same mile-. Stones as an ordinary forward-. Looking existence—it usually starts. In attendance, but the patient is.
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The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
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On January 8, 1981, while living in exile in. Venezuela, Isabel Allende received a phone call. Telling her that her grandfather was dying. She. Began writing a letter to him, which gradually. Morphed into a fictionalized account of the. Of her native country Chile. In 1981, in Caracas, I put a. Sheet of paper in my type-. Writer and wrote the first. Recalled. At that moment. I didn't know for whom I. Was doing it, or from whom. In fact, I assumed that no. One would ever read it except. This interlude in ...
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The Golden Ass by Apuleius
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What was the first significant magical realism. Many readers will point you in the direction. Of Gabriel García Márquez, whose 1967 work. Hundred Years of Solitude. Did much to legitimize. The incorporation of magic. And fantasy in literary fiction. Others might call attention to. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban. Novelist whose 1949 novel. The Kingdom of this World. Anticipated Márquez in its. Combination of myth and. Latin American history in a. Fictional account that leavens. Its intense social realism with.
