Six feet of the country

Nadine Gordimer

Penguin, 1982 - Fiction - 100 pages

Seven stories of South Africa deal with a missing body, a mysterious Rhodesian visitor, a pass law protest, a white geologist and his Black secretary, and a pair of childhood sweethearts

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Sean191 - LibraryThing

Well, I didn't realize when I picked this up that some of the stories where originally published in "Selected Stories." But at the end of the book, there was a teaser for "Selected Stories" which said ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - herschelian - LibraryThing

Seven short stories taken from two previous collections 'No Place Like' and 'A Soldier's Embrace'. I think I almost prefer Gordimer's short stories to some of her full length novels, she manages to distil the essence of South Africa on to the page in these.

Contents

• Six Feet of the Country: 7
• Good Climate Friendly Inhabitants: 21
• A Chip of Glass Ruby: 36

About the author

Winner of many international awards, South African Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal and received her education at a convent school and at the University of the Witersand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Gordimer - novelist, short story writer, and essayist - is one of South Africa's best-known authors, and she is perhaps the country's most gifted contemporary novelist. In her fiction Gordimer consistently attacks the system of apartheid from the standpoint of the white middle class. Her stories show how some whites slowly awaken to the injustice and moral corruption of the system while others fail to see how the racial policy eats away at the moral basis of society. Gordimer's narratives are rich in detail and precise observation. She frequently uses a single well-drawn event, incident, or scene to capture the sense of broad social decay she seeks to depict. In an early work, The Late Bourgeois World (1966), she expresses some cautious hope for the future of South Africa. A Sport of Nature (1987), her most recent novel, shows the development of a young, middle-class, white woman into a political activist.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Six feet of the country; Penguin books; Penguin books: Fiction
• Author: Nadine Gordimer
• Edition: 17, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin, 1982
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 6, 2008
• Length: 100 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; History / Africa / South / Republic of South Africa; Short stories; Short stories, South African (English)