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 …
The Human Stain by Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 365 pp., $26 What Philip Roth has always needed—and what, like Joseph K., he has been unfairly denied—is a proper trial. If not for the attacks on Jewish suburbia in Goodbye, …
Literature has been an extraordinarily influential institution in postcolonial Africa, and African writers have been prominent in the struggles to build modern democratic societies on the ruins of the colonial state and against the brutalities of the many dictatorial post-independence …
Michael Walzer’s penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent (“Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus’s Algerian War”), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned writer’s position during the French-Algerian war, when he refused to ally himself, unlike the …
For the past twenty years or so, the study of literature has been dominated by formal analysis. We have been told to examine carefully the structure, imagery, and tone of a literary work, so that we can see the novel …
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote New York: Random House 343 pp. $5.95. Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of …
James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s …
