Within every great comic writer lies the certainty of tragedy else why bother to go after the big guffaws? The British writer Rachel Cusk has this dark knowledge well within her grasp: It's all over "In the Fold," her fourth novel, from the epigraph,...

High Country A NOVEL Willard Wyman University of Oklahoma Press, Lincoln, 3005.362 pp. $24.95 paper. Willard groan's novel, High Country (winner of the 2006 Western Writers of America awards for Best Novel of the West and Best First Novel) is the story of...

A Libyan took over as president of the U.N. Security Council Thursday, capping the nation's climb back to respectability. But its ambassador said Libya's past ordeal under U.N. sanctions puts it "in a very difficult position when we speak about imposing sanctions against another country."The...

Jeff Fassero is retiring from baseball after winning 121 games over 16 major league seasons.The 44-year-old lefty, cut by the San Francisco Giants in May, worked out for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Feb. 2."I thought I threw really well. I guess they didn't they...

In the following essay, Rowden analyzes racial and sexual identity in Baldwin's Another Country, focusing on the character of Rufus, his relationships, and his place in the community.

Baldwin attempts to deal honestly with a number of sexual relationships most of which were taboo to previous writers. In Another Country it is suggested that security, order and common sense are illusions, and that only people like Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass and Eric, who submit themselves to the mystery and chaos of their emotions, are truly alive…. For Baldwin and his characters, sexual experience involves an entry into an unknown violent country…. Most people fear this journey into the unknown an...

[When] I finished [Another Country], I felt as if I had become one of the minor characters in it, though less real and utterly outclassed sexually. Even this is no threat. One cannot get lost in Baldwin's work because it is completely contiguous with reality; an extension of it in depth rather than a substitute for it. There is no sense of transition, merely of immensely heightened awareness and vividness and moral understanding….