Writer

AT 62, WRITER MAYA ANGELOU can look back at the shy, unspeaking little girl who lived in Stamps, Arkansas during the Depression and remember herself. She can also reflect upon the ballet dancer, the chanteuse, the opera singer, the screen writer, the playwright, the poet, the autobiographer and claim these for herself too."The more liberated a person is the more free she can be to look at herself through various and sundry prisms. It is indicative of a narrow society when we say, 'because he's a brick mason he can't like ballet,' or 'because she's an intellectual, she can't speak slang.

PAULE MARSHALL doesn't claim to be fashionable. In fact, few of the adjectives one might ascribe to a popular writer of the '90s seem to apply to her.She is an admittedly slow writer, publishing a novel about once every decade. She's also a very private person, never having felt comfortable with the publishing world's penchant for thrusting authors into high-profile positions.While neither pace nor privacy has precluded her recognition as a major American writer in literary circles, she never seemed to attract a large popular audience to match the critical acclaim of her work.

The Disappearance of the Outside:a Manifesto for Escape.Andrei Codrescu.Addison-Wesley.216 pages. $17.95. When we think about imagination, often we think only of it in relationship to art, and not life. That is a dangerous and debilitating practice, Andrei Codrescu declares in this polemical collection of essays. The sinewy plea underlying all the essays is his advocacy of the imagination as a moral and political force.According to Mr. Codrescu, in the East the atrophy of the imagination caused by the restrictions and repressions of the police state has led to brutality; and in the West the superficiality of consumer-oriented image-makers has led to narcolepsy.

IRKUTSK, Russia -- There are 45 members in the Writers Union in this city of 600,000, which sounds like a pretty high novelist-per-capita ratio, but only one of them has a serious reputation that extends beyond this corner of eastern Siberia.And even he isn't doing much writing these days, afflicted as he is with a discouragement, a post-Soviet letdown, that borders on despair.He is Valentin Grigorievich Rasputin, a novelist and short-story writer whose world has been torn asunder by the collapse of the very system that once persecuted him.Mr.

Diana K. Sugg, a reporter for The Sun, was named winner yesterday of the 1997 A. D. Emmart Memorial Prize for "The Forever Children," a March 23 article on an aging man's struggle to care for his 43-year-old disabled son.Her article also won the 1997 Community Media Excellence Award, one of two awards given annually by The Arc of the United States, a national organization on mental retardation.The Emmart prize of $1,000 honors writing in the humanities published in a Maryland general-readership newspaper or magazine.

THE ART OF HUNGER: ESSAYS,PREFACES, INTERVIEWS.Paul Auster.Sun & Moon Press.! 312 pages. $24.95As a title, "The Art of Hunger" applies to much more than the leadoff essay on the odd first novel called "Hunger," published in 1890 by Knut Hamsun -- a work so idiosyncratic that in its pages, says American novelist Paul Auster, Mr. Hamsun "walks straight into the twentieth century" and into an artistic challenge most serious writers face a century later.This...

In this corner, weighing 200-plus pounds, from Oakland, Calif., Ishmael ("Writin' Is Fightin' ") REED!!!And in this corner, the rest of the world.Guess who wins.More often than not, it's Ishmael Reed. In all of America, there may not be a more adept polemicist, a more skilled satirist, than this large-framed, acerbic 54-year-old writer -- or one more eager to join in the fray, whatever the subject.Here is Mr. Reed writing in his new novel, "Japanese by Spring," about a favorite target, black feminists:"While the underclass women were getting their subsistence budgets cut by white male politicians, journalists, and think-tank black pathology gangsters, she, being a "talented tenth" aristocrat, blamed the problems of her and her 'diva' buddies on white women and black men."

BOSTON -- At first, the two aging gangsters don't recognize Rick Marinick as he glides through the old neighborhood. He's usually behind the wheel of a junker with chipped paint, not his wife's shiny import, so it takes a beat before scowls turn to schoolboy grins and the men shout out greetings. Marinick waves back. The old South Boston Irish mobsters might as well be family, and these one-way streets are home: taverns where he and local boys planned bank heists, parking lots where federal agents eavesdropped, hoping to catch stray shop talk among members of the notorious Winter Hill gang, the lonely stretch of Sugar Bowl beach where enforcers kept bookies and gamblers in line.

Baltimore may not be Hollywood East, but once again, the Oscars include a distinctly Bawlamer element. Craig Bartholomew Strydom, writer of the Oscar-winning documentary "Searching for Sugar Man," lived in Baltimore until last year. Read about his involvement with the film here . With some luck, maybe he'll return to Baltimore for his next project? Perhaps a documentary on Frank Zappa? Now there's a documentary that needs to be done...  

THE WOMEN in "Practicing Emptiness" explore the ambiguous ground between the power of feeling special enough to be "kept" and the powerful revulsion at becoming so dependent. They talk of trade-offs, trade-offs and more trade-offs.You hear about women who marry men they don't love, about women whose self-images depend upon how bloated they feel when they wake up in the morning, about how sexual abuse is cultural as well as physical. It leaves you with the impression that prostitution is one of the most honest transactions possible between the sexes.