The Thing Around Your Neck

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)

In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.

This article was originally published on February 16, 1963.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction

by J. D. Salinger

(Little, Brown; $4)

The chief danger a reviewer has to fight against, in tackling Mr. Salinger's stories about the Glass family, is the temptation to an ungenerous ribaldry. The author lays himself so terribly open; and, of course, since he is a clever man who could be just as cagey as anyone if he chose, this frequent throwing away of defenses has something admirable about it.