Anyone craving a concise, well-turned tale knows that "Law and Order" is showing on one channel or another at every hour of the day.
Julavits insouciantly writes that if you have no idea "what a word means… suddenly it can mean anything", but her mistranslation of "sous les combles" ("under the rafters") as "under a grape arbour" only muddies the tale's concise clarity.
So we get a well-crafted, concise, and conscientious allegorical tale that highlights our collective addiction to this black gold.
Buck and her fellow raconteurs tell snippets of their stories — true and personal and performed on independent bookstore stages of the American South — and reflect on the significance of telling tales "as tight and concise as a pitch meeting in Hollywood, yet as moving and essential as a Greek tragedy".
Even though one can find the tale of the algorithm nicely laid out in "Alan Turing: The Enigma," by Andrew Hodges, and whimsically explored in Douglas Hofstadter's "GRated PG-13del, Escher, Bach," there is room for a more concise account that would bring the tale to a wider audience, people who sit in front of their computers with barely a hint of the ideas that animate the chips.
In this week's issue and here online (see The Critics), Louis Menand reviews two new books on lying and liars, Evelin Sullivan's "The Concise Book of Lying" and Jeremy Campbell's "The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood," and wonders whether either is an honest account of untruth.
In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger called the album "gentle, fairy-tale ambience", with the songs that move from "concise and vivid" to "spacy, ethereal material with lengthy instrumental passages".
A new series of Ladybird books, the colourful, concise and decidedly wholesome publications that introduced generations of children to everything from fairy tales to hovercraft, is targeting a grown-up audience.
