{"product_id":"9781429967600","title":"Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that's so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it.\"\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eIn this collection of new stories,\u003ci\u003e Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black\u003c\/i\u003e, Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. \"Dreaming of the Dead\" conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in \"History\" is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.\"Alternative Endings\" considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories—and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47181865517296,"sku":"9781429967600","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429967600_p0.jpg?v=1769902641","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429967600","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}