DEEP in the Amazon jungle, a tribe of Indians succumbs to decay and despair; a disfigured jew from Lima, determined to preserve them, appoints himself their story. teller. His own story is then told by the man who has been striving to become...

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>Name: DJ J. Period >Hometown: L.A., Ca, but reps BK to the fullest! >Pro Stats: J.Period has tapped the storytelling potential of mixtapes by collaborating with A-List artists such as Nas, Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul and more to create “Best of”...

Checks from Hollywood's A-list stars such as George Clooney, Eddie Murphy and Barbra Streisand added up to a one-night take of $1.3 million for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.Obama spoke to a star-studded audience at a closed-door fundraiser in Beverly Hills arranged by three of...

Mr. Sillitoe's idea [in "The Storyteller"] is promising, but his explication is ponderous. For an artist to write about the anguish of being an artist is to risk the reader being embarrassed for him. How avoid a kind of Byronic swagger, the implication that the burden one carries is only slightly lighter than the Cross? Mr. Sillitoe avoids neither. Furthermore, his prose is as tortured as Cotgrave's life or nonlife, and shamefully careless. Dangling modifers abound …; meta...

Sillitoe's later work has often explored [the contradiction] of a developed, indignant, and compassionate social sense [combined] with a strong urge to push out into fantasy or even nightmare. The Storyteller faces the problem (if problem it can be called) head on…. Ernest Cotgrave discovers, one day in school, that he can divert the attentions of the school bully by spinning out a weird and wonderful tale about a mythical seafaring uncle…. The hero is the creator of other characters, o...

The Storyteller is something of a disappointment. Its main drawback is that it is much too tightly wound upon the armature of its narrative premise. Purporting to be the story of a 30-year career in professional storytelling, though its deeper preoccupations … are with a man's misery in marriage and with the disintegration of the ego in psychotic breakdown, it fails to find a satisfactory way of performing the tasks of characterization, plotting, and fable-ing that are expected from the down-t...