Writers and Politics by Conor Cruise O’Brien New York, Pantheon. 259 pp. $4.95. Conor Cruise O’Brien, at least on the international scene the radical-liberal intellectual par excellence, has recently published a new collection of articles and speeches, Writers and Politics. …
It was Susan Sontag, I think, who first pointed up the extreme theatricality of Marat/Sade. Susan Sontag was right, Marat/Sade is theatrical. Is the play dramatic, though? About this there seems to be some question in even Miss Sontag’s mind. …
Dear Sartre: May I take public issue with you for the claims you make in “What is Literature?” You claim literary importance, even preeminence, for socially committed, or “responsible” writing; you claim also that anyone who happens to be unprejudiced …
“…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of `facts’ they feel stuffed…`brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion, without moving…Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology…That …
I first met C. Wright Mills in 1941 or 1942, when he was a young assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland (at that time, at least, a singularly dismal-looking provincial school whose president was one “Curly” Byrd, …
Young people today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that …
If N beats K Or K beats N The electorate is bound to win The blessings of a four-year grin…
Translated by George Dennis, this article, written in poetic prose by an anonymous Russian writer, is presented here in its first full English translation.
My first contact with Dostoevsky’s novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say. It came only when I was twenty-two. And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances. The conditions of my undertaking …
In the time of the war lords and of the Koumintang, it was not so hard for leftists, even Stalinists, to write something readable about China. Your leftist went there in person, and afterwards reported frankly what he had seen …
Imagine Don Quixote without his horse and his drooping whiskers, and you will get a fair idea of what George Orwell looked like. He was a tall and angular man, with a worn Gothic face that was elongated by vertical …
Kafka’s recent entry into Russia has a history of its own. For several decades the visionary from Prague belonged—theoreticall he still belongs—to the Unholy Trinity of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka. This Trinity has been condemned in Russia on every possible …
The author of this story—which first appeared in the Polish magazine Kultura published in Paris—is at present serving a five-year term at forced labor somewhere in the Soviet Union. He was recently sentenced together with another Russian writer, Abram Tertz. …
I am setting down the following melancholy reflections not with any hope of a remedy, but because the matter is important and nobody else seems to be saying it. In many ways literature has, in this century, become a minor …
How did Western media accounts transform China’s Xinjiang region from an obscure, exotic district into a hotbed of terrorism?
