In the following essay, Newman discusses Gordimer's life, career, awards and recognition, and overall body of work, while also examining the era in which Gordimer wrote and the critical reception of her works.

In the following essay, Lazar examines Gordimer's attitude toward Feminism as evidenced in her short fiction collection.

In the following essay, Newman analyzes the psychological connections that Rosa makes between race and sexuality in Burger's Daughter in relation to prevailing cultural attitudes toward each.

In the following essay, Cancel examines the cinematic adaptation of Gordimer's short story “Oral History,” contending that the film version “is remarkable in the way it takes Gordimer's understated, nuanced story and overlays it with a powerful African liberation theme.”

In the following essay, Harrow considers the relationship between Ernest Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and Gordimer's “A Hunting Accident.”

In the following essay, Knipp traces the thematic development of traditional expressions of Western liberalism in Gordimer's fiction.

In the following essay, Huggan applies Gordimer's theoretical writings regarding the short story form to four of her short fictions: “Six Feet of the Country,” “A Company of Laughing Faces,” “Livingstone's Companions,” and “Keeping Fit.”

In the following essay, Newman offers a thematic analysis of the stories in Jump and maintains that with this volume Gordimer explores post-apartheid political and social concerns.

In the following essay, Huggan applies Gordimer's short story theory to her practice, analyzing "Six Feet of Country" in comparison to three later stories.

Miss Gordimer is a stylist, a gem-polisher who creates in the reader a sense of Katherine Mansfield's shimmering immediacy of image. Sometimes the gems are not worth the polishing; sometimes the style does not seem congruous, in the broad mural of a novel especially. Yet her gifts are so diverse, her range so astonishingly broad, her gallery of places and people so various, that one cannot speak of her world in a phrase, as one would say Faulkner's South, or Hardy's Wessex. Her nimble i...

In the following essay, Githii compares several of Gordimer's earlier and later stories in order to trace her thematic and stylistic maturation.

In the following essay, Hill discusses defining characteristics of Gordimer's fiction, in particular the impact of South Africa's political and social landscape on her work.

In the following essay, Eckstein considers Nadine Gordimer's short stories as an attempt to break down dichotomies in South African political culture.

In the essay below, Lomberg traces Gordimer's changing attitudes towards life and love in her short fiction.

In the following interview, Gordimer discusses her work and political change in South Africa.

In the following essay, Jacobs asserts that Jump and Other Stories represents an important stage in Gordimer's political and literary development, as it begins to explore postapartheid political and social issues.

In the following essay, Colleran discusses the ways in which socio-political conditions in South Africa inform Gordimer's work.

In the following essay, Eckstein discusses the political atmosphere of South Africa and how it affected Gordimer's career and fiction.

In the following essay, Gordimer outlines her philosophy of short story writing.

In the following review, Wood concentrates on characterization in None to Accompany Me, detecting autobiographical impulses in the narrative.

Banville is an Irish novelist and short story writer. In the following negative assessment of Jump, and Other Stories, he derides Gordimer's reportorial voice and contends that the short story medium is unsuited for her style of writing.

In the following excerpt, Topping Bazin discusses how utopian and dystopian visions of Gordimer's novels reflect past and present racism in South Africa.

In the following mixed review, Chettle maintains that the theme of transition is central to the stories collected in Loot.

An Indian novelist, nonfiction writer, and critic, Rushdie is best known for his controversial treatment of Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). In the review below, he provides a thematic treatment of Something Out There, focusing on Gordimer's theme of betrayal

Below, Wieseltier discusses the effects of apartheid on Gordimer's black and white characters in "Something Out There."

Mojtabai is an American novelist and critic. In the following review, she overviews the themes and plots of A Soldier's Embrace.

In the following review, Milton comments on the themes of Writing and Being.

In the following review, Bausch praises Gordimer's personal approach to social and political issues in her None to Accompany Me.

In the following favorable review of Jump, and Other Stories, Wideman commends Gordimer's eloquent, realistic portrayals of interpersonal relationships amidst the turbulent socio-political conditions in South Africa.

In the following excerpt, Bayley discusses the stories of Jump in the context of classic stories by literary masters of narrative art.

In the following review, Eder emphasizes the theme of change, both social and personal, in the South Africa of None to Accompany Me.

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.

Tracy is a English novelist and travel writer. In the following essay, she provides a mixed review of Not for Publication.

In the following excerpt, Godwin discusses the changing African dimension of the characters in Selected Stories.

In the following excerpt, Clayton comments on Gordimer's writing style in Something out There.

Gornick is an American nonfiction writer, editor, and critic. Below, she offers a negative assessment of A Soldier's Embrace, describing the stories as "fragmentary" and the collection "unsatisfying"

In the following essay, Froelich and Halle contend that “Once Upon a Time” reflects an important stage in Gordimer's political and literary development.

In the following review, Graham describes Gordimer's artistic ethos as outlined in Writing and Being.

Lehmann-Haupt is a Scottish-born American critic. In the following favorable review, he explores the varying narrative techniques employed in Something Out There.

Redman is an American critic. In the following review, he lauds the scope of the stories included in Selected Stories.

Gullason is an American editor and critic. In the following essay, he offers a laudatory review of Livingstone's Companions.

The ironies that surround the liberal point of view in a multiracial society have been a persistent theme in Nadine Gordimer's work. In A Soldier's Embrace,… Southern Africa remains the setting, with one exception. There are a number of reasons, however, for finding the mixture not quite the same as before…. [The] "natives" of her early stories became first "African" and then later "Black". In her view, this last term is singular in being...

Brown is a South African critic. In the following review, he praises the maturity and emotional intensity of the stories of Not for Publication.

In the following excerpt, Cruttwell contrasts the mood of Gordimer's fiction with Flannery O'Connor's.

In the following review, Poore praises the stories in Not for Publication.

In the following review, Roraback notes the freshness of the themes in Jump, despite their familiarity.

In the following review, Callil notes the stark subject matter and lack of punctuation in the stories of Loot, arguing that the tales are difficult to read.

In the following review, Dinnage outlines the narrative of None to Accompany Me.

In the following mixed review, Bell examines Gordimefs treatment of South Africa's repressive political and social conditions in Livingstone's Companions.

In the following review, Stallings provides a thematic analysis of the stories comprising Six Feet of the Country.

[Gordimer's] knowledge of the politics of her country is strong and her sense of the politicalness of life profound, but her power resides in the force of sexual feeling that permeates her work and makes of racist South Africa a metaphor for the stunning sorrow of caged and harnessed lives. It is interesting, in this sense at least, to compare Gordimer with V. S. Naipaul … whose work covers the same territory, so to speak—that is, colonized Africa, the decay of empire, rising black fury...

In several of her novels—A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, The Lying Days and The Conservationist—Nadine Gordimer implies that the insulted and injured make substantial ghosts, haunting a society whose survival depands on the maintenance of insult and injury. Indeed, "He's dead but he won't lie down" could serve as an appropriate epigraph to much of her fiction. The South Africa she describes in affectionate, glowing detail is a country in which an aba...

In the following excerpt, Mitchell focuses on Gordimer's narrative technique in Not for Publication.

Stern is an Irish novelist, short story writer, translator, and critic. In the following review, he offers a positive assessment of Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country.

In the following review of The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Barkham praises the subtlety and sensitivity of Gordimer's narrative voice.

Chase is an American novelist, children's author, educator, and critic. In the following review, she examines the style and scope of Friday's Footprint.

In the following excerpt, Kearns discusses the politics of Gordimer's fiction in Something Out There.

Curran is an American novelist. In the following negative review of Friday's Footprint, she notes the uneven prose style and lack of psychological complexity in Gordimer's stories.

In the following excerpt, Harding assesses the narrative strengths of None to Accompany Me.

In the following review, Smee derides the prose style of the stories in Loot, finding it inferior.

Gordimer is no reformer; she looks beyond political and social outrage to the sad contradiction of the human spirit, which delivers to those in power an even worse sentence of pain than they themselves can pass upon their victims. For her, as for many writers since Conrad, Africa embodies in fearful and epic simplicity a diagram of the failures of civilization: an awesome balance of ultimate innocence and ultimate corruption. But for her the heroic scale of this antithesis is also familiar, unexceptional, o...

William Peden is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on the American short story and on American historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. In the following review, he applauds Gordimer's debut volume of short fiction, The Soft Voice of the Serpent.

In the following review, the anonymous critic argues that Gordimer “can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing.”

[Selected Stories] is full of pondered, significant details, the symptoms of [the] dementia—the bureaucratic and social combinations that make everybody ill, white and black alike. The stories are not all about race relations and the stresses they place on people who suffer, enforce, try to mend, or even to live with them; some are about the restricted lives of the whites themselves, their self-imposed and paralyzing mental suburbanism. Gordimer splendidly observes the remnants of persons beneath the...

In the following excerpt, the critic highlights the theme of lonliness in Not for Publication.

[Nadine Gordimer] traces in her stories a shift in subject-matter from earlier paternalism to the multiracial dreams of the Fifties and on to the disillusioned legacy of white (and black) liberalism in the Seventies…. A Soldier's Embrace extends the historical process, with characteristic fierce irony…. As a whole the volume sets fixed, negative social patterns against the threat imaged by the lion's roar, 'the rut of freedom bending the bars of the cage'. The stori...

A Soldier's Embrace is a collection of thirteen of [Gordimer's] stories, all very short. Still, although they are short, and strong, like almost everything she writes, they are not easy to read. They hurt. They are [sad and beautiful]…. Women suffer deeply in these tales of Africa. But then, so do husbands, fathers, sons, lovers; and they suffer largely because of women. In some of the stories, notably in "Town and Country Lovers," women and men suffer together because of ...