Eight hundred double column pages of what is most alive and quirky in contemporary literature! With some notable exceptions virtually everybody who is anybody is represented in this monster anthology of the Evergreen Review. Here is a very partial list: Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Williams, Pasternak, Neruda, Borges, Kott, Genet, Sontag. The anthology is a reminder of how Evergreen and its publishing house, Grove, were quick not only to sense which way the Zeitgeist was blowing (one of the comic strips concerns a Phoebe Zeitgeist), but also to respond to genuine talent and good writing. The format, the print, the glossy texture resemble Playboy. One hefts the magazine, flips through the pages, feeling one is enjoying a pleasurable commodity. Evergreen learned sooner than anyone else the secret of combining the sophisticated and the vulgar, the intellectual and the sensational, avant-garde “integrity” and commercialism. The magazine is a classic instance of having one's cake and eating it. Not that it hasn't been “persecuted.” Indeed, it seems to relish the moments when the authorities lose their “cool” and attempt censorship (for instance, the effort to censor Emil Caddo's nudes). The effect on sales of attempted censorship in our open society is well known. (The net sales of Evergreen for ‘68 were up nearly two million dollars from the same period in 1966.) And why shouldn't the editors enjoy the possibility of commercial success? In our pop world, of which McLuhan is prophet, compromise has become an irrelevant category.