Dystopia and the End of Politics  

▪ Fall 2008

In retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the …



Morality as Style  

▪ Winter 2003

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis Talk Miramax, 2002, 306 pp., $24.95 All novelists are Stylists, but only a few are known chiefly for having what Vladimir Nabokov called “a fancy prose style.” Over the …



Societies of Mutual Isolation  

▪ Fall 2001

Blindness by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero Harcourt Brace, 1998 293 pp $22   All the Names by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Harcourt Brace, 2000 238 pp $24   The twentieth century was the era of …



Wresting Freedom from Necessity  

▪ Spring 2001

The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov, translated by Joseph Barnes, introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya New York Review Books, 2000, 288 pp., $12.95 In Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit, Nastya—a beautiful and precociously ideological, kulak-baiting little girl on …



Fall 2024

Subscribe
Facebook Facebook Instagram

Sign up for the Dissent newsletter:

choose your bearing
living right