This collection of essays, articles, critiques and addresses extends over four decades, and includes the author's Nobel Prize lecture of 1991. Her themes are wide-ranging, moving from the impact of technology on our world-view to the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction.

Contents:

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