In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, there’s no danger of desiccation. Morrison’s work is as insistent as ever. She could still be charged with inciting a riot—albeit a quiet one, one that lends itself to pernicious reversals of thinking rather than dramatic implosions.
Joseph Brodsky—the Joseph addressed in the epigraph—once said that when you hear Derek Walcott’s voice, “the world unravels.” It is a voice concomitant with the sea, and by connection, history.
VQR Editor Charlotte Kohler chose Nadine Gordimer's short story "The Catch" for publication in the Summer 1951 issue. It was the young South African writer's first letter of acceptance for publication in an American magazine. Some forty years later, she received the Nobel Prize. This letter from her agent is part of the Gordimer correspondence and manuscripts in the VQR archives in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
Vor mir liegt, auf sammtenem Grunde, ein zierliches Schmuckstuck,—eine Reise-Trophae, ein ehrenvol-ler Besitz. Es ist eine kleine, goldene, mit Ringen versehene Plakette, deren eine Seite, zwischen dreieckig ge-stellten Sternen nnd einer weisenden [...]
The German public which has given to "The Forsyte Saga" the greatest success that has been won by any foreign work since Rolland's "Jean Christophe" knows quite well the features of its author: that clear profile of unmistakably English stamp, upon w [...]
We’ve got to examine truth. To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible. And early on I found that you think, for instance, you know people, you think you know someone. But the person who is in a different relationship with that person knows a different person. So there are all these facets . . .
He was a young D.Phil. from Budapest then—when they emigrated, for reasons nobody here is interested in, there have been so many waves of Europeans, whites moving in on the blacks’ country. Whether this time the instance was escape from Communist rule or the rule that succeeded it in Hungary, is neither here nor there. Soon the country of adoption went through an overturn of regime of its own; victory, and the different problems unvisioned that presents, preoccupied the population long programmed to see themselves only as black and white.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following interview was conducted in 1977 for publication in El Manifiesto—a now-defunct Colombian leftist journal. Chatting with the magazine’s staff writers, García Márquez opens up remarkably and bares his most nostalgic and personal side, even swearing on occasion. (The author can be surprisingly, spontaneously foul-mouthed when in the right company.) And he's unusually frank about his spotty education, his days of poverty, his youthful days residing in brothels, and his having been accidentally cured of boils by putting No One Writes to the Colonel to paper.
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