Twenty-one dazzling essays on classic writers, a tour de force of literary criticism but also a very personal insight from one of America's finest writers on what makes other writers tick. There are essays on: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Saul Bellow, Edith Wharton, J. M. Coetzee, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Truman Capote, Theodore Dreiser, William Gaddis, I. B. Singer, Gershom Scholem, S. Y. Agnon, Bruno Schulz, Gertrude Kolmar. A second collection - on the art of writing - to follow in October 1993.