One of the largest publishers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins University Press combines traditional books and journals publishing units with cutting-edge service divisions that sustain diversity and independence among nonprofit, scholarly publishers, societies, and associations. Thus, it fulfills his credo for the artistic function: "Real writers question their age." (FLS) But ultimately the novel is a kind of parable of reconciliation which emerges from the excursion into interracial sexual intercouse, homosexuality as a normative mode of experience, and bisexuality as a real phenomenon. Thematically, the work treats the variety of subjects and topics modulated in other of the author's literature: the search for identity, the intensity of emotions, the terror and joy of sexual experience, the skirmishing of blacks and whites who encounter and interact, the reality of suffering and the tragic. Symbolically, the novel is richly suggestive with the major emphasis resting upon the urban environment with its nightmarish Dantesque hell of entrapment and isolation as indicative of contemporary American civilization and its moral chaos and spiritual destruction the significance of the title embodies geographical, ethical, and psychological considerations. Structurally, the book has three sections and a plot comprised of four narrative strands these sections and strands converge and intertwine in a kind of phantasmagoria of interracial and intersexual relations among friends and strangers. The novel is, however, a competent and compelling book: structurally, symbolically, thematically. James Baldwin's Another Country has received widespread disapproval from critics and reviewers with few exceptions.