00000cam a22000003i 4500 UP-1685594773862178262 Buklod 20200222085509.0 g||| | || || ta 200222s2001 nyu r |||| u|eng d 9780375409165 (hardbound) (iLib)UPBAG-00036024731 OCLCdBAG rda eng PS 379 M28 Mallon, Thomas 1951- author. In fact essays on writers and writing Thomas Mallon. New York Pantheon Books [2001] xiii, 352 pages 25 cm text rdacontent unmediated rdamedia volume rdacarrier The fabulous Baker Boy -- Speed the plot -- Writing like the dickens -- Dead ringer -- Read it and beep -- Joan Didion : trail's end -- And quiet flows the Potomac -- The best man -- True grit -- The Bronx, with thonx -- Book of revelation -- The Norman context -- Tom Wolfe bonfires Atlanta -- Snow falling on readers -- Is God read? -- A measure of self esteem -- The Great War and Sassoon's memory -- Babbitt redux -- U.S.A. today : Dos Passos reconsidered -- Scrappy days : the life of H.L. Mencken -- Appointment with O'Hara -- The big uneasy -- Too good to be tru -- The novel on Elba -- Virtual Mary -- My fans' notes -- A literary mugging -- Six feet under, but above the fold -- Indexterity -- Minding your p's and q's -- Bookmobile -- A boy of no importance -- Held in check -- Sanctified by blood -- Enough about me -- Life is short -- Double Dutch -- Writing historical fiction -- The historical novelist's burden of truth -- Five practitioners -- Varlet's ghost -- Lens democracy -- One small shelf for literature -- The revolution : a minority report -- On not being a poet. "In Fact gathers the best of Thomas Mallon's superb criticism from the past twenty-two years - essays that appeared in his GQ column, "Doubting Thomas," and in The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Harper's, among other publications. Here are his evaluations of the work of contemporary writers such as Nicholson Baker, Peter Carey, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Robert Stone, and reassessments of such earlier twentieth-century figures as John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote, and Mary McCarthy. Mallon also considers an array of odd literary genres and phenomena - including book indexes, obituaries, plagiarism, cancelled checks, fan mail, and author tours. And he turns his sharp eye on historical fiction (his own genre) as well as on the history, practice, and future of memoir."-- BOOK JACKET. American fiction 20th century History and criticism. English literature History and criticism. FO UPBAG UPBAG-MAIN PS 379 M28 Book