AMIS, Martin (born 1949) British novelist The novels of Amis fils are icily satirical, cold with rage at the physical and moral sleaziness of the human race. His characters’ preoccupations are sex, drugs, money and success, and they are tormented by failure to win, or keep, all four. Ronald Firbank and F. Scott Fitzgerald found…
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Kingsley Amis: Biography & Books
AMIS, Kingsley (1922–95) British writer of novels, poems and non-fiction In the 1950s, when Amis’s writing career began, British writers of all kinds – the ‘angry young men’ – had begun to rant in plays, films and novels about the unfairness, snobbishness and priggishness of life. Whingeing became an artistic form – and Amis’s novels…
Eric Ambler: Biography & Books
AMBLER, Eric (1909–98) British novelist and screenwriter Ambler worked in advertising, the film industry and the secret service before becoming a full-time novelist. The deadpan style of his thrillers lets him move easily from violence to farce, and he either sets his books in exotic places (the Levant, the Far East, tropical Africa), or makes…
Douglas Adams: Biography & Books
ADAMS, Douglas (1952–2001), British novelist Adams began his career as a radio joke-writer, and also worked for the TV science fiction series Doctor Who. He made his name with a series of genial science fiction spoofs, beginning with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). In this, Earthman Arthur Dent, informed that his planet is…
Peter Ackroyd: Biography & Books
ACKROYD, Peter (born 1949), British writer Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist – his Dickens is 1,200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed – and his fiction benefits from a researcher’s eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters…
Margery Allingham: Biography & Books
ALLINGHAM, Margery (1905–66), British novelist Allingham wrote ‘crime fiction’ only in the sense that each of her books contains the step-by-step solution of a crime, and that their hero, Albert Campion, is an amateur detective whose amiable manner conceals laser intelligence and ironclad moral integrity. But instead of confining Campion within the boundaries of the…
Isabel Allende: Biography & Books
ALLENDE, Isabel (born 1942), Peruvian-born Chilean novelist Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits (1985), was a glowing family tapestry in the magic-realist manner of >> Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, spanning five generations and thronged with larger-than-life characters and supernatural events. She followed this vein in Eva Luna, which is particularly evocative…
Characters in The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers
Aiken In the 1964 segment, Aiken is a player for Delaney High School, against whom Tommy Lewis plays hard. Annie Annie is Lizzy’s cousin in the 1864 segment of the novel. She does not understand why Joshua and Lem ran away. Bob Archer At the end of the 1964 segment, Bob Archer drives Tommy home…
The Glory Field: Summary
July 1753. Off the Coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa Muhammad Bilal is traveling on a slave ship from Africa, where he was captured by slave traders. He is trapped with other slaves in close quarters for a voyage of at least a month. Like the others, he suffers from pain and thirst, and longs…
Summary of ‘Beauty: The Retelling of the Story of the Beauty & the Beast’
Part One Beauty tells the story of a young girl whose given name is Honour, the youngest daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant named Roderick Huston, who lives in a large city by the sea. Her sisters are named Grace and Hope. Honour, upon hearing her father explain the meaning of her name at five…