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| | hackwriters.com - Five Decades - The Irwin Shaw Short Stories Collection - Review by Dan Schneider |
 | | These were the days, of course, before the gravy trains of National Endowments for the Arts grants, and their requisites that good artists remain untainted by popular and financial success, and merely leech off the taxpayer with PC screeds, ridiculously mind-numbing work that scorns the reader, or puerile art merely intended to shock. |
 | | And there is little fat in Shaws tales- they are lean with the rat-a-tat-tat staccato of their sentences construction, and their poetry comes not from a strained contrivance of clichés, but the juxtaposition (often jarring) of the most common of things, phrases, and moments. |
 | | Shaw does this over and over again in these tales, which is a feat that writers like John OHara, or J.D. Salinger, his contemporaries, at their best, could never do with any consistency. |
| www.hackwriters.com /Irwin.htm (2620 words) |
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