Description
Book SynopsisThe Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.
Trade ReviewA stimulating book…brilliantly shows that while American literature and music offered Czechs a dream of improvisatory freedom, Czech literature offered Americans an example of what, variously, they might do with it as if it mattered. -- Kathryn Murphy * Times Literary Supplement *
Goodman brilliantly reveals how US–Czech literary encounters produced, largely unintentionally, the figure of the ‘dissident writer,’ which eventually became the symbol of the human rights movement that brought down the Iron Curtain. He reminds us that the Cold War was a period of lively, if often tortured, cultural exchange that cannot be reduced to the terms of a Cold War binary. -- Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Free WorldEye-opening and unforgettable. Goodman is a wonderful storyteller, and this is a story never told before. Featuring a vibrant continuum of literature, music, and theater linking Czechoslovakia and the United States, this East-West fusion sheds light on Franz Kafka, Václav Havel, and Josef Škvorecký no less than Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of
Weak PlanetIlluminating and full of insights. With lucid and often elegant prose, Goodman masterfully tackles the continuities between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War era. Among its many virtues,
The Nonconformists moves us away from a US-centric literary history and toward one that attends carefully to the cross-cultural networks that extended across the Iron Curtain. -- James Dawes, author of
The Novel of Human RightsBeautifully written and imaginatively conceived,
The Nonconformists brilliantly captures the ambiguities of moral witness in the era of Cold War literary dissent. Goodman takes us on a grand literary tour showing how the transnational encounters between such towering figures as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Václav Havel, and Milan Kundera were foundational for the emergence of a new global human rights order in the late twentieth century. -- Mark Bradley, author of
The World ReimaginedGroundbreaking and highly original. Goodman’s meticulous archival research and his capacious familiarity with the latest research in Czech and American studies is impressive. Even more so is his ability to stitch together what might initially seem to be adjacent case studies into a deep fabric of transnational intellectual history. -- Michelle Woods, author of
Kafka Translated
