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The Spell of Indecision

“In the past two decades, there has been a complete change in the dominant attitude of Marxist criticism towards Modernism. Essentially, Marxist readings of avant-garde literature are increasingly based on interpretative theories—Russian Formalism, Bakhtin’s work, theories of the ‘open’ text, deconstructionism—which, in one way or another, belong to . . .” read more

War and Peace in Stalin’s Russia

“Vasili Grossman’s massive novel has rightly been compared with War and Peace. The author himself makes it obvious that Tolstoy’s masterpiece not only inspired him but served as a model for his saga of a great country fighting against enormous odds for its very existence. Both artists chose . . .” read more

Mario Vargas Llosa: Parables and Deceits

“Some time ago I urged a friend from Lima to read Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta—clumsily entitled The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta in the English edition—so that he might give me an insider’s opinion of the book’s treatment of the Peruvian revolutionary left over the last thirty . . .” read more

The Latin American Novel

“When was the novel born in Latin America and how did it develop?” read more

The Migrant’s Vision

“Shame, Salman Rushdie’s new novel, is written from a very different perspective from that of the earlier Midnight’s Children. The latter novel was a book written about India by an Indian; the white metropolitan reader was an eavesdropper, overhearing the voice of a strange, far-away country of . . .” read more

The American Connection: The Masculine Style in Popular Fiction

“In recent years the growth of oral history projects in many countries testifies to the importance now given to popular experience, memory and activity recoverable through personal interviews. Many of these projects have concentrated on experiences of working life, family life, women’s work and political activity, the struggle . . .” read more

The Dialectic of Fear

“The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy . . .” read more

Expressionism and Working-Class Fiction

“In his essay, ‘The Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin distinguishes between two generic traditions of story-telling, symbolized by two contrasting occupations: the peasant and the voyager. ‘If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives’, he wrote, ‘one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, . . .” read more

The Maximov Phenomenon

“It is a truism that Russian literature has been traditionally political: but it is still one that cannot be overlooked by any literary critic, or for that matter, any reader of Russian belles lettres. Both writer and bureaucrat in Russia, from opposite sides of the gulf that separates . . .” read more

A Spanish Masterpiece

“Son of a poor Madrid washerwoman whose husband had died, Arturo Barea was born in 1897 in Madrid. He was brought up by a relatively well-to-do uncle and a bigoted catholic aunt. A scholarship took him to a catholic school for the rich in Madrid, while both sides . . .” read more

Mishima

“Mishima’s death provides an excellent and salutary occasion to look at two important phenomena: the nature of Zen culture in Japan, and the condition of the Japanese army.” read more

Kilroy was here/Kilroy war hier

“when i was II i saw ‘Kilroy was here’ on the shattered walls on overthrown columns on bar tables in the gents the yanks wrote it all over the place” read more

Literature between Myth and Politics

“If socialist literature is to give a fuller and more comprehensive interpretation of reality than all other schools, it must systematically demythologize the countless myths that cover up man’s alienation in capitalist society. At the same time it must examine critically how far and under what conditions the . . .” read more

The Reactionaries: W.B.Yeats. Wyndham Lewis. Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot. D.H. Lawrence.

“The Reactionaries: W. B. Yeats. Wyndham Lewis. Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot. John Harrison: D. H. Lawrence. Victor Gollancz.” read more

Introduction to Brecht’s Poems

“In recent numbers of New Left Review we have presented poems by two self-avowed Marxists—Attila József and Franco Fortini. We now present some poems, hitherto untranslated, by a third, Bertolt Brecht. One of the reasons for printing work by these poets is to call attention to the problems . . .” read more

Four Poems by Bertolt Brecht

“1” read more

Italo Svevo

“It was Brecht, with his cynical mind, who remarked on the reluctance of 20th-century novelists and their readers to discuss the workings of business. Since this country alone publishes some eighty novels a week it is a bit difficult to generalize very reliably about them, and maybe there . . .” read more

'Time of Silence'

“Luis Martin Santos: Time of Silence. Calder & Boyars. 30s.” read more

'Imagination Dead Imagine'

“Samuel Beckett: Imagination Dead Imagine. Calder and Boyars. 8s. 6d.” read more

Communism (1958)

“I was a communist throughout. Justly though, the other communists looked askance at me. I was a communist despite their certainties, despite my doubts. Justly they did not see themselves in me.” read more

Franco Fortini

“The relationship between poetry and politics has always been complex and difficult; in this century the complexity and difficulty has been given a new dimension by the emergence of powerful, organized Communist Parties. It is no longer possible for the radical or even revolutionary writer to be merely . . .” read more

Attila Jozsef

“Readers will remember that in nlr 24 we published translations of two poems by the Hungarian poet Attila József, and provided there a short account of his life. We now present another poem, ‘Consciousness’. It was first published in 1934, one year after József was expelled from . . .” read more

Consciousness

“i” read more

The Phlegm Shed

“Jorge Onetti was the 1965 short-story winner of the Cuban Casa de las Americas prize open to writers from all Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. (A report on the prices, as well as on current developments in Cuban culture, was presented by J. M. Cohen, the only Briton . . .” read more

Poems

“Surly, unambitious the flies languidly loop the loop near the porch ceiling It is what passes for Spring here” read more

Robert Curtis’s Review of 'Bunga Emas'

“Bunga Emas (‘Golden Blossom’, according to your reviewer, Robert Curtis, in nlr 31) means tribute, and as explained in the glossary and jacket, is a token resistance of the Chinese and Indian (non-Malay majority of Malaysia) writers and poets to their evanescent mother cultures. Inclusion of their . . .” read more

The Alien

“motifs” read more

Poems

“Finally we sat in haste grading our thoughts and words unburying the spent day skull-clippers picking hearts, whispering laughter.” read more

'Europe After the Rain'

“Europe After The Rain. Alan Burns. John Calder. 21s.” read more

'Lawd Today'

“Lawd Today. Richard Wright. Anthony Blond. 21s.” read more

The Way Back

“To be published shortly in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Barbara Wright, John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, 18 Brewer Street, w.i, at 35s.” read more

Bunga Emas

“Nothing could better illustrate the bizarre contradictions and factitious pretensions of what President Sukarno of Indonesia calls ‘the project Malaysia’ than this volume. Notwithstanding the impassioned oratory of the editor in a preface and three postscripts, not one of the 57 pieces in this anthology give the reader . . .” read more

Socialism and Literature

“Jorge Semprun is a Spaniard who fled to France as a Republican refugee in 1936. He fought with the French Resistance and was imprisoned in Auschwitz. In 1963, living in Paris, he was awarded the Prix Formentor for his novel, The Long Voyage, which was published in . . .” read more

Condition of the Novel (Czechoslovakia)

“A selection from a conference of European writers at Leningrad, Summer 1963.” read more

Condition of the Novel (USSR)

“This is the first of the European Community of Writers’ meetings I have attended, but I was able to look at some brief notes taken by an observer at the last meeting in Edinburgh, and I felt the need to say a number of very unfashionable, even banal . . .” read more

Condition of the Novel (Britain)

“I shall only speak for five minutes, since I am not sufficiently clever or educated to do so for longer. This is not just modesty though it may seem like that. I should add perhaps that several times during this conference it has occurred to me that if . . .” read more

Condition of the Novel (France)

“There have been a number of very interesting speeches here. But I must express my astonishment at hearing the majority of Soviet writers expressing the same sharp criticism of modern literary pursuits as are made in Western bourgeois society. Here, as in the West, we are blamed for . . .” read more

Condition of the Novel (France)

“Since I have not written a novel for 16 years, my interest in this discussion, though lively, has been dispassionate; it is this which encourages me to try to give a detached impression of what has happened. As you know, when a meeting of this kind is a . . .” read more

'The African Past'; 'Modern African Stories' and 'Modern African Prose'

“The African Past. Edited by Basil Davidson. Longmans. 30s.” read more

Condition of the Novel (Britain)

“In these closing stages of our meeting, I should like to give you some of the impressions which I and the other members of the English delegation have received of the various speeches, and draw some conclusions.” read more

Condition of the Novel (West Germany)

“‘Strange whim of the people’—writes Heinrich Heine—‘to ask for its own history from the poet, instead of the historian’. But the ‘people’ is right, and its whim is anything but extravagant. If Plato says that poets lie, what words could ever define official historiography? The method it . . .” read more

Poems 1964

“My love comes in at half past five And lies down, worn out; her eyelashes laden With grubby mascara, and her eyes full Of ultra violet seen through a green shade.” read more

Condition of the Novel (USSR)

“I have the impression that the subject of our meeting has been wrongly defined as ‘the crisis in the novel’. Every writer is convinced that he writes well and that he belongs either to the innovators or to the traditionalists. He is sure that the crisis in the . . .” read more

'Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity'

“Wordsworth & The Poetry of Sincerity. David Perkins, Harvard & O.U.P., 32s. 6d.” read more

'The Italian Girl'

“The Italian Girl. Iris Murdoch. Chatto & Windus, 21s.” read more

Sex and Language

“Within the last four years, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the two Tropics of Henry Miller have at last been allowed to circulate freely. Both writers use the so-called ‘obscene’ words extensively, and the publicity given to the Lady Chatterley case, as well as the character . . .” read more

The Essays of James Baldwin

“Reading Baldwin has been, for me, a strange, complex experience. It was one containing a mixture of agony, pride (sometimes real, often false and embarrassing), displeasure, envy, admiration, and profound disagreement. I have confessed this as a warning to the reader who might be expecting a rational, impartial . . .” read more

Vanguard Culture

“‘William Burroughs—extremely gifted writer—almost a giant compared with Kerouac, etc—correctly described by the introduction as being in the tradition of Dostoievsky, Kafka and Beckett—his unbridled intellective violence and genuinely modern imagination make him a good interpreter and excellent poet of this epoch of ours: an epoch which projects . . .” read more

'Our Lady of the Flowers'

“Our Lady of the Flowers. Jean Genet. Blond, 30s.” read more

'The Long Shadow'

“The Long Shadow. Clark Griffith. Princeton, 48s.” read more