SOURCE: "Stories of Love and Irony," in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, October 21, 1956, p. 3.

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

With each new book, Nadine Gordimer augments her status as a writer. Six Feet of the Country, a collection of short stories which have, with only two exceptions, already appeared in American magazines, establishes beyond any doubt that she is not merely a gifted regionalist but a writer of great sophistication who is aware of all the subtle innuendoes of human relationships. Her perception is intensely feminine, but she expresses herself with a fine unfeminine irony; compassionate, she rejects pathos.

Most of the fifteen stories here are concerned with one of two themes: the first, the baffling, tragic encounters of one race with another; the second, the no less complex and unsatisfactory meeting grounds of...