The ’90s publishing paradigm favored confessional memoirs, legal thrillers, and books about genetically recreated dinosaurs taking over amusement parks. We couldn’t get enough of the stuff. But though we still enjoy the confessional memoir, we’re less inclined to go for a Crichton rip-off today, for whatever the reason. Probably because we’re too engrossed in reading vampire fiction for chaste teens or books about four-year-olds seeing the light. What were the authors you loved in the ’90s that you think fell of the map a bit, readers? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Dialect can be used as a class marker, or as something that identifies your hometown, your race, or your predilection for jargon. There are standard dialects, which are those institutionally-approved ways of speaking that make us understood, but are frankly a little boring. And then there are Newfies, the stalwart denizens of the oddly-shaped island near Québec who speak a language very much their own. The authors below use dialect either as a majority of the novel or as an abrupt break from the narration; many of them are from the opposite side of the Atlantic, but some of them are from the South, or fake it, like Cormac McCarthy.
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It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
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