The range and variety of Jane Smiley's work as a writer of fiction have resulted in a great deal of critical attention, a wide and committed readership, and several different perceptions of her achievement. Smiley's novels, particularly those following T...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley has also won acclaim for her work as an author of short fiction. In The Age of Grief: Stories and a Novella (1987), Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas (1989), The Life of the Body: A Story (1990), and...

MOOs and MUDs were developed by aficionados of computer games in order to make the games more interactive. The first such environments, developed by Stephen White, were called Multiple User Dragons, or MUDs. Later, these environments were enhanced and...

A MOO, an acronym for (MUD object oriented), is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time. The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to those programs...

OTHERS till the same ground. Garrison Keillor sends up the good folk of those farming states in the mid-west that New Yorkers think all have names beginning with I; David Lodge mocks the follies of academic lives and tenures in the late 20th...

ROCKY HILL A modern-day milkman builds a business one doorstep at a time When Roy Gwin thinks he has a good idea, he doesn't take no for an answer. In 1989, when he was managing a South Brunswick Grand Union supermarket, Gwin...

A judge on Monday granted a reprieve to Shambo, a sacred bull at a Hindu monastery who had been threatened with slaughter because he is suspected of carrying bovine tuberculosis.Shambo's plight raised intense arguments about whether public health concerns superseded religious rights. His caretakers at...

The decision to slaughter a bull revered as sacred by his Hindu caretakers is justified, a British court ruled Monday, overturning a decision by a lower court last week.The ruling could spell the end for Shambo, a 6-year-old Friesian bull, whose life has been in...