To write about your contemporaries is a risky business; your interest may be too personal, your involvement too close. But this, as Susan Suleiman aims to demonstrate here, is precisely what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. Her book shows how the process of self-recognition - even self-construction - in the reading of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society; and to the dimensions of historical awareness and collective action. Suleiman suggests a fresh way of looking at issues that are as personal as they are relevant in the writing, the criticism, and the life of our times. Through her readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Elie Wiesel and others, Suleiman enters a dialogue with those who share her place and time, and whose interests and preoccupations meet her own. She confronts with them the conflicts between writing and motherhood. Together, they inquire into being postmodern and explore the connections between creativity and love. They consider the place of beauty in contemporary art, examine the relations between aesthetics and politics, and reflect on living memories of World War II. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with the readers, opening new perspectives on the representation of women's lives, history and memory, the intersection of gender and postmodernism, and autobiography.