SOURCE: "Truth Teller in South Africa," in The New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1976, p. 7.

Mortimer is a Welsh novelist, short story writer, and critic. In the following review, she terms Selected Stories a social history of South Africa and praises Gordimer's use of the milieu in her stories.

South Africa, in the latter half of the 20th century, is an anomaly that incites more frustrated, personal indignation than any other political society.

There, on the tail of the vast black continent of Africa, sits the Union, authoritarian, racist, wealthy, implacably thickheaded, smugly disregarding every liberal principle and every concern for what we consider to be common humanity. We demonstrate, sign petitions, refuse to buy canned peaches; not altogether trusting the South African authorities to censor our work for us, we impose a cultural boycott, depriving the bastards of our tepid little intellectual plays until—presumably by means...