A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries

A senior editor at Harper & Row, Solotaroff is former editor-in-chief of the defunct New American Review (later the American Review), editor of Many Windows, a selection of stories from the American Review, and author of The Red Hot Vacuum, a collection of essays and book reviews. Here he offers a second book of essays and book reviews, all of which have appeared since 1969. His taste in reading tends toward Jewish and Eastern European writers, intellectuals who happen to write fiction, who look askance at society (whether it is valueless capitalist or drab socialist) and who fight for culture. Solotaroff writes perceptively, almost intimately, about Philip Roth, Stanislaw Lem, Vladimir Voinovich, Jacobo Timerman, George Konrad, Milan Kundera, among others. Several essays recall the period when he wrote fiction that was limited by his own grand, suffocating ideas about what made a good story. In publishing matters, he is a bit of a curmudgeon, railing against an industryparticularly its major housesthat ""has largely sold out its cultural purpose to its commercial one.'' This is a lively, gracefully written collection that prods as much as it philosophizes. (October)