They may nominally be writing police procedurals, but what they really do, book after book, is take a scalpel to contemporary society and slice away until its dark essence reveals itself: the ways in which women continue to be victimized, their misfortunes down- played by men (and women) who don't believe them, and how they eventually overcome.
Nominally, Naipaul is writing about Anand Biswas.
Nominally, he is writing down the boy's "begats"—three generations of Reverend Ameses, each a little less storied than his forebear but he is also sifting his long-considered personal faith.
He continued to write nominally from inside the progressive camp, as a fellow-liberal and modernist casting a cool eye on liberalism and modernism; and he produced some significant essays — on the "two cultures" debate between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, on Isaac Babel, on James Joyce's letters.
A cohort of 80 students in a third year chemical engineering (64% response rate) course voluntarily recorded their engagement using a Likert-type scale at intervals of 5 min in a (nominally 50 min) lecture, together with written comments.
Now she has written a big, ambitious novel that is nominally about God, although it unfolds on an extremely earthly plane.
Written for Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (variable instrumentation: nominally picc, 2 fl, ob, a.sax, t.sax, b.sax, horn, tp, 2 tbn, drumset, elec gtr, acoustic gtr, hp, pf, d, perc,, 2 soprano, vc, 3 cb, electronics).
The novel, he writes, is nominally about baseball (the hero, Henry Skrimshander, is recruited to play shortstop at a college called Westish), but is also, at heart, "a story about how we become ourselves".
One might not expect the first essay, Emily Cooke's "The Lonely Ones," nominally a discussion of writing by Susan Sontag and Vivian Gornick, and in reality a devastating inquiry into solitude and its relationship to fulfilling love.
