Mr. Bowman’s books — which almost never came to be after he was hit by a car in 1989 and suffered a brain injury — achieved a devoted following among readers who love highly allusive literary fiction in which plot, character and landscape are subordinated to the narrator’s absolute freedom of movement.
Paul Vitello, The New York Times (New York City, USA), May 3, 2012.
…it was mainly through his literature, Mr. Fuentes believed, that he could make his voice heard, and he did so prolifically and inventively, tracing the history of modern Mexico in layered stories that also explored universal themes of love, memory and death. In “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” a 1962 novel that many call his masterpiece, his title character, an ailing newspaper baron confined to his bed, looks back at his climb out of poverty and his heroic exploits in the Mexican Revolution, concluding that it had failed in its promise of a more egalitarian society.
Anthony DePalma, The New York Times (New York City, USA), May 15, 2012.
Well, the American writers I know weren’t influenced by him line by line or even paragraph by paragraph because of the language difference, but I think he showed us just how big and inventive and bold and daring a writer could be, taking imaginative themes and tying them to everyday life of ordinary people.
Alan Cheuse remembering Fuentes in All Things Considered, NPR (USA), May 15, 2012.
“Mexico City, you know, first of all, there’s the altitude. Then there’s the air that is no longer clear. You have lunch from 3 to 6. Then you have dinner from 11 to 2.”
Carlos Fuentes quoted in report, Elizabeth Blair, NPR (USA), May 16, 2012.
…his fascination with the inner life of children was undeniable, and he spent his life wondering — aloud and in writing — what makes them tick. In a 2002 interview with children’s book historian Leonard Marcus, he declared his life’s work: “The question I am obsessed with is: how do children survive?”
Story by Bonnie Rochman, Time (USA), May 9, 2012.
(Source: TIME)
“He came from an unhappy background. He would talk about it often, as if it was a badge of endurance, kind of a championship that he won, to see how long he could survive his background, and a lot of that came out in his work,” said Heller.
Shazia Khan, NY1 (New York City, USA), March 8, 2012.
“He changed children’s writing, and American culture with it,” said Amy B. Jordan, director of the Media and the Developing Child sector at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “He wasn’t afraid to explore the complex, dark, baffling side of children’s minds.”
Story by John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA), May 10, 2012.
Imbued with a high level of energy and a strong work ethic, the bearded, bespectacled Mr. Granger wrote 28 books under three names — Bill Granger, Joe Gash and Bill Griffiths — over a 20-year period. The South Chicago neighborhood native loved using the city as the backdrop for his characters and stories.
Bob Goldsborough, Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Ill. (April 25, 2012).
Critics commended Christine Brooke-Rose for utilising the precepts of French post-structuralist theory to create works that playfully demonstrate the “fictionality of fiction” — novels in which such concepts as narrative, character and plot play little part, and the formal rules of tense, grammar and language are treated as tools for linguistic pyrotechnics, puns and wordplay.
The Telegraph, London, England (April 26, 2012).
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
He filled articles and books with tales of his rust- belt romance with her dark streets, alleys and taverns. “A lot of real Chicago lives in the neighborhood taverns. It is the mixed German and Irish and Polish gift to the city, a bit of the old country grafted into a strong new plant in the new,” he once wrote.
Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago, Ill, USA, April 23, 2012.
A slow-moving English-language thread on novelists and their craft.
