DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. "The Stone Face" is a 1963 novel by the Black reporter and fiction writer William Gardner Smith. It's just been released in a new edition by New York Review Books. And it tells the story of a writer who, like Smith himself, moves to Paris in hopes of finding a freedom he couldn't find in America. Our critic-at-large John Powers says that this book addresses issues that could hardly feel more timely today.