The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain by Brian K. Goodman Available to Purchase

It might come as a surprise that a book that traces the various literary histories of Prague’s counterculture turns out to be one of the most compelling monographs in the field of American literary studies. Brian Goodman’s book The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain is, however, just that: it unravels the rich history of transnational cultural exchange between the United States and Czechia, illuminating aspects of American literature that were hitherto unnoticed, whether it is Franz Kafka’s role in the forming of the Beat counterculture (26), F. O. Matthiessen’s engagement with the Czechoslovak cultural elite in which he saw an “old dream of a proletarian avant-garde, long abandoned in the Soviet Union” (83) on which the foundations of a bridge between the socialist East and liberal West could be built, or Philip Roth’s extensive engagement with the “other Europe” (189) that radicalized his own style. Goodman’s...