A selection of essays and reviews published over the past twenty-five years in the , , the , and other journals and collections, offers engaging discussions of a wide range of modern and contemporary American and European writers. Highlights include: discussions of the posthumous reputations and publications of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Ralph Ellison; extensive examinations of the work of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, and Susan Sontag; introductions to the work of Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, and Salman Rushdie; essays on Cynthia Ozick, Richard Stern, John Ashbery, and Jamaica Kincaid; shorter reviews of books by John Irving, Erica Jong, Aharon Appelfeld, and Jiri Weil; a history of the Chicago novel, and a selection of reviews of the work of contemporary Chicago authors such as Leon Forrest, Bette Howland, Michael Anania, Charles Dickinson, and Harry Mark Petrakis.