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Recent Examples of exemplumIn 2013, the Italian playwright Stefano Massini turned this exemplum into The Lehman Trilogy, an epic five-hour play that was adapted and condensed last year by the director Sam Mendes and playwright Ben Power for the National Theatre in London.—Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 11 June 2019
Allusions to myths, fables, and riffs on common idioms abound, many of them evocative and quite funny.
—
Lora Kelley,
New Yorker,
7 Aug. 2025
As three people with remote connections to a house try to solve two brutal murders, the story becomes increasingly complicated and implausible, evolving into a fable about a cursed family.
Never a fan of this kind of rhetoric—with which she and the rest of the country had been bombarded for years—Michiko inwardly bristled at the anecdote before the running dialogue changed tack to rumors about the new‑type bomb the Americans had just dropped on Hiroshima.
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Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
7 Aug. 2025
And Ron Rakow told a great anecdote about his job interview with Jerry Garcia.
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