• 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 Assistant Professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College.

Drawing on novels by Nabokov, Wright, Powers, DeLillo, Didion, and others, No Accident, Comrade examines the shaping influence of the Cold War's obsession with chance on post-World War II fictional form.