No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world.

Chapter One: Chance, Narrative, and the Logic of the Cold War
Chapter Two: Aesthetic Responses to Political Fictions: Pynchon and the
Violence of Narrative Chance
Chapter Three: The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold: Nabokov's Cold War
Chapter Four: Accidents Going Somewhere to Happen: African-American
Self-Definition at Mid-Century
Chapter Five: The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the
National Security State
Chapter Six: Their Country, Our Culture: The Persistence of the Cold War
Coda: Cold War Meaning
Bibliography
Index

Steven Belletto is Associate Professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College.