Read by David Colacci, Susan Ericksen

In this collection of new stories, Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story, a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. "Dreaming of the Dead" conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Sa├»d return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in "History" is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped. "Alternative Endings" considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories-and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell. "Gordimer is a precise, politically astute writer whose novels, story, and nonfiction works are charged with sprightly humor, sudden insights, and fearless candor." "It is Gordimer's special skill that she can both make us feel the distinct yearnings of these characters, where nothing else matters, and allow us to stand back and perceive the parts they play in a larger collective pattern. As she always has, Gordimer offers her readers a rare combination of intimacy and transcendence." "Nadine Gordimer pushes buttons and the boundaries of race, politics, and sex." "On nearly every page there's evidence of Gordimer's intellectual rigor, as well as the upright discipline all serious writers possess." "Gordimer offer[s] a staccato demonstration of how people's origins, inheritances and histories-and the loss of them-are inescapable…The results are terrifying, sometimes acidly funny and often beautiful." "No slick irony, no heavy messages; as always, the mix of intimacy and politics stirs everything up." "Executed with finesse and power"

Mode of access: World Wide Web