【推荐1】Fait Diver: More Than Brief Stories

Every day, there are items in the news believed too minor to report at length. For these _________ stories, French newspapers of old had a solution: a section called fait divers: stories of a paragraph or a few   lines. These brief   stories were   typically   of some_________ or odd   occurrence: train accidents, lovers' quarrels, drownings, suicides. The fait divers remained a practical form, intended to convey a   story without _________ too much space, but it also developed into an art. In   French literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture and influenced the writing of _________ as varied as Stendha（司汤达）, Flauber（福楼拜）,     and Camus（加缪）, sometimes as the_________ inspiration for what later became a novel. _________ a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English press as a literary form.

Perhaps the finest flowering of fait divers was in the reports filed by the art critic Felix Feneon 1906. He gave the   form more wit, more emotional _________ and formal perfection, than it     had had before. In his hands, it became ironic, dark, and very funny. His collected fait divers, published in English as Novels in Three Lines, was a(n) _________ to me. It inspired me to undertake _________ projects. One was a sequence of fait divers set in contemporary Nigeria and__________ from   the newspapers there. The other was based on stories from New York City's newspapers in 1912: the New-York Tribune, the New York Herald, the New York Times. I called my projects small fates."   an   acknowledgment   that   so   many   of   these   stories   are __________ about   the   strange   workings of chance.

One   can go days in New York   without really thinking about how __________ these   streets once were by crowds of people, all of whom are now dead. I found in writing the small fates that these long-gone New Yorkers suddenly came back to the__________ tense when you are not even ready for   it. The fine   details made   their lives vivid and __________. They were no longer__________, and at times seemed even more real to me than the latter-day outside my window.

【推荐2】When my mother told me stories about Emily, her grandmother, who she admired, I was all ears. My mother drew a _______ between Emily and Jacqueline Kennedy, former US president’s wife. Mom described her _______ features: a long graceful neck and a tiny waist. “Emily was just like Jacqueline,” Mom said. “But their origins wouldn’t _______: Emily was graceful, soft-spoken, but possibly born a slave.”

Emily attracted me. Not until 2005 did my research on ancestry really start to _______ , for the reason that I was no longer _______. “When does your new job start?” asked my mother. “I refuse to take a job for at least a year,” I replied. My mother had no _______ with such words. “Anyway, you should have a job.” I remained _______ and didn’t explain it. But I felt I must _______ my job to collect more stories about my _______.

I ________ my mother’s line to a place called Cane River. I found the bill of shameful slave sale for my great-great-great grandmother, who was ________ in 1850 for $ 800. I had to write the stories. This time the novel Cane River was sold in a（n） ________ way.

One day, the phone rang, “Hello, this is Oprah Winfrey, the talk show hostess.” I couldn’t believe my ears. I responded in ________, “Hello, Ms Winfrey. What can I do for you today?” She told me she selected my novel for her book club, which ________ led to Cane River on The New York Times bestseller list and a ________ readership than I expected.