Contemporary fiction and radical politics

Pankaj Mishra and Jennifer Szalai discuss the representation of extreme political ideas in fiction in the NYT

Writing as the clamorous protests of the 1960s faded away, Philip Roth seemed almost envious of writers in Communist Eastern Europe, who had gained moral prestige and authority through their perilous defiance of repressive governments: “There,” he wrote, “nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.”