South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer received numerous awards and honors during her career, among them the Booker Prize, the Rome Prize, and, in 1991, the Nobel Prize in Literature. We revisit here a relatively early story, first published in KR and later appearing in a 1965 collection of her short fiction, Not For Publication, and Other Stories.
Nonfiction
Winter 1970
The Interpreters: Some Themes and Directions in African Literature
What is African writing? Must one be black or brown in order to write it, or may one be any old color? Must the work deal with situations that couldn’t […]
Fiction
Spring 1969
Livingstone’s Companions
For Carl Church, D. J. who knows In the house that afternoon the minister of foreign affairs was giving his report on the President’s visit to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. […]
The International Symposium on the Short Story, Part One
Autumn/ September 1968
South Africa
Why is it that while the death of the novel is good for post-mortem at least once a year, the short story lives on unmolested? It cannot be because—to borrow […]
Fiction
Winter 1965
Vital Statistics
Ismelda was one of the Catholic children the convent taught for nothing, making it up on the fees charged for non-Catholic pupils. Not all of the Catholics were free pupils, […]
Fiction
Winter 1964
One Whole Year, and Even More
I was waiting for Iscott in the foyer of the savoy yesterday when the two of them started nattering next to me. “This one’s a Swede—we wouldn’t take an Italian […]
Fiction
Spring 1962
Message in a Bottle
There are days when the world pauses, gets stuck, senselessly, like one of those machines that ought to give cigarettes or make balls bump round but simply becomes an object […]
Message in a Bottle
From the Kenyon Review, Spring 1962, Vol. XXIV, No. 2 There are days when the world pauses, gets stuck, senselessly, like one of those machines that ought to give cigarettes […]