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David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89

The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. His best-known work, “Campus Trilogy,” dramatized the brief heyday of English literature as a discipline and the jet-setting lifestyle of its professoriate. Read more

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Barry N. Malzberg Dies at 85

The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction. Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Read more

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Henry Taylor, Prize-Winning Poet With an Eye on Rural Life, Dies at 82

Henry Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who drew on his upbringing in rural Northern Virginia — galloping on horseback, riding a combine through the fields — to write exquisitely crafted verses about wild places, the inevitability of change and what he called the “consequences of ignorant choices,” died Oct. 13 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read more

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Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75

Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died on Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, Calif., in Sonoma County. Read more