Books in Brief

Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times, by Brooke Allen (Ivan R. Dee, 256 pp., $26)

In the introduction to this, her first collection of essays, Brooke Allen declares: “Really good writers do not write well in spite of the foibles, prejudices, and fallacies of their times; instead they crystallize these oddities into something universal, create archetypes rather than characters or situations. . . . [The 20th] was a colorful and grotesque century, and it produced a wide variety of odd attitudes.”

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Literature

Twentieth-Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times, by Brooke Allen (Ivan R. Dee, 256 pp., $26)

In the introduction to this, her first collection of essays, Brooke Allen declares: “Really good writers do not write well in spite of the foibles, prejudices, and fallacies of their times; instead they crystallize these oddities into something universal, create archetypes rather than characters or situations. . . . [The 20th] was a colorful and grotesque century, and it produced a wide variety of odd attitudes.”