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Facts on Fiction: Englander’s latest suffers lapses in authorial control
It's hard to say what exactly Nathan Englander's short story "Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" is all about. It's got something to do with hard cider, a woman fondly dubbed "Bean," the Freedom of Information Act, and a Jewish-Ukranian butcher who—one can only infer—gets smote by vengeful Old Testament God when he falls into a vat of boiling hams.
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Facts on Fiction: DeLillo’s first short story anthology sure to resonate
"Hammer and Sickle"—one of nine stories compiled from the last 30 years of Don DeLillo's career in his first-ever anthology, "The Angel Esmeralda"—depicts two prepubescent girls who anchor a children's news program. Their local access broadcast purports to offer international investment advice, and the scripted dialogue alternates between sounding—as it should—inane and informed. Their father, a man behind bars, watches them on television and thinks to himself their lines must have been written by his wife. Although fewer and fewer prisoners return to watch subsequent airings of the program, the dialogue of the children's show is unforgettable: "The word is Dubai." "Say it." "Dubai."
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Facts on Fiction: Livesey’s latest fails to stand on own two feet
Former Bowdoin Writer-in-Residence Margot Livesey's seventh and newest novel is an homage to Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic, "Jane Eyre." Having never successfully finished any work by a Brontë sister, however, my experience reading Livesey's "The Flight of Gemma Hardy" felt highly akin to reading Harry Potter.
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Facts on Fiction: ‘Art of Fielding’ changes landscape of contemporary literature
One of the most underrated episodes in the history of "The Simpsons" is a little ditty from the fourth season entitled "Duffless." Although it's one of the most disjointed of the show's entire run, the episode is both touching and poignant as it depicts a month-long struggle Homer undertakes in an attempt to overcome his alcoholism. It's also damn funny.
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Facts on Fiction: Flirting with art, artifice, Barnes’ latest grapples with truth
It seems fitting that critical and popular opinion would be divided over a book with as vague a title as "The Sense of an Ending."
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Facts on Fiction: Shooting too high, Eugenides’ ‘Marriage Plot’ misses the mark
In his latest work, "The Marriage Plot," Jeffrey Eugenides alternates between the points of view of three different characters and flashes back to different moments in their past ad nauseam. This facet of the 406-page "epic" might make the act of reading it easy for those of us who suffer from internet- and texting-induced A.D.D., but, ultimately, it betrays an utter lack of inventiveness.