“Nigger” is the word upon which Bill Kauffman balances and dances his first novel, Every Man a King. It is, to say the very least, a difficult word. It is a word denied to white lips in polite society, and is now heard only coming with any frequency from trash-mouthed blacks. The saying of the...

Any literary effort by David Slavitt is a complicated business for a reviewer. The complexity arises not immediately from the work itself, but from the prolific nature of Slavitt. To date, he is the author of 13 works of fiction, 14 books of poetry or translation, two books of nonfiction, at least eight pseudonymous novels,...

Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived. Yet, for better or for worse, for many of the named victims, Štajner’s...

Concocted by four editors of something called Equator magazine (I am told it is a large glossy tabloid of odd people doing odd things), Hot Type‘s subtitle is: “Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction.” On the basis of the writing selected, I don’t know if I would let some...

The Irish have a word—as they are supposed to—for this sort of book: blather. The author could be described as one of those fellows who “does go on,” to the point of being, eventually, barred from the pub for boring everyone to tears. The Gun in Politics bears the subtitle “An Analysis of Irish Political...