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Travel
The World According To Irving, Garp, Bensenhaver
Book Review
John Irving has laid his cards on the table. From what seemed to be the beginning of a long realistic chronicle, he has moved into a world of fantasy, symbol, and wild humor, and for the rest of the novel he settles into neither world, but shuttles back and forth between the two.
January 1979Angel At The Gate
In the year I was sixteen, on the first day of that new year, my father died, and since that time I have longed hopelessly for a paradise that will never return.
December 1978The Horseman Of Marrakech
I rubbed my eyes to clear my vision. I looked closely once again to make sure. I could barely see the tall shape prancing in and out of the traffic. I squinted through the haze and then knew I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. “Yes,” I said to myself, “he thinks he’s a horse.”
December 1978Memoirs Of A Professional Killer
Some Sea Stories From The Big Deuce
Once they gave a war, and everybody came. They called it World War II, and the entire basis of this essay is that one man’s recollections of it — necessarily different from every other man’s — are worth preserving.
October 1978Old Master
Book Review
What most impresses me about the work of V.S. Pritchett is its stunning variety. I am faced with the question that often arises in confronting a substantial artist: how can he know all that he does? Each story is unique in its characters, techniques, its tone: each creates its own small peculiar world. “Blind Love,” the title story of an earlier volume, and the third story in this one, deserves special mention.
October 1978Sunbeams
October 1978And where to all these highways go
Now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still
That were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine
O stranger at your wheel
You are locked into your suffering
And your pleasures are the seal
Tobacco Town: Durham’s Beginnings
The rising lust for smoking tobacco made Durham and Duke. In 1870, a year after it was incorporated, the one-square mile village had a population of 256. There were 3,000 residents by 1884, 6,679 by 1900, and an estimated 18,000 by 1907.
July 1978Stories
Hitched to the University of the South at Sewannee, Tennessee. School was out and there were few people around — my last visit I stayed at Beta Phi fraternity — so checked it out again — no one around, but back door conveniently open, so I made myself at home.
July 1978Cars And Other Headaches
We took it as just so much more enemy venom when Nikita Khrushchev said the Russians didn’t have to fight the United States because we would spend ourselves out of the “race.” Enemies are always wrong; who would believe a character like that?
February 1978
