Living in Hope and History Notes from Our Century

Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of her years as a public figure--an observer of apartheid and its aftermath, a member of the ANC, and the champion of dissident writers everywhere. In a letter to fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes Living in Hope and History as a "modest book of some of the nonfiction pieces I've written, a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in." It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991.

Nadine Gordimer's most recent work includes None to Accompany Me (FSG, 1994), The House Gun (FSG, 1998) and The Pickup (FSG, 2001). She has received many awards, including the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions.—Salman Rushdie

Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics
The Status of the Writer in the World Today: Which World? Whose World?
Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-first Century
References: The Codes of Culture
The Lion, the Bull, and the Tree
Günter Grass
The Dialogue of Late Afternoon
Joseph Roth: Labyrinth of Empire and Exile
An Exchange: Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer

How shall we look at each other then?—Mongane Wally Serote

1959: What Is Apartheid?
How Not to Know the African
A Morning in the Library: 1975
Heroes and Villains
Crack the Nut: The Future Between Your Teeth
How Shall We Look at Each Other Then?
29 October 1989—A Beautiful Day, Com
Mandela: What He Means to Us
The First Time
Act two: One Year Later
The Essential Document
As Others See Us
Labour Well the Teeming Earth

The ceaseless adventure.—Jawaharlal Nehru

The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State
Writing and Being
Living on a Frontierless Land: Cultural Globalization
Our Century

Notes