The Non-Fiction Issue: A Preface

The first, dated Winter-Spring 2015, featured poems and stories and interviews with eight major writers; the second, dated summer 2015, showcased a very different kind of Salmagundi issue featuring extensive symposia and debates built around such subjects as "The Clash of Civilizations," "Race and Racism," "Kitsch," "The New Puritanism" and "The Consciousness Industry." [...]missing from this volume is the remarkable 1993 feature devoted to James Miller's book, The Passion of Michel Foucault, or the features built around the work of the great German director Margarethe von Trotta, or Hannah Arendt, or "The Sense of the Past," or "Lying and Liars." The criticism assembled in this best of Salmagundi volume says, simply, resoundingly, yes it can, even when it is fierce and driven and full of conviction, even when it is focused on a book, or a film, or the political thought of Hannah Arendt, or the delusions associated with the fashionable notion of "the death of the author."