The essayist, critic, novelist, short story writer, and biographer presents 203 essays on such writers as Gibbon, Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Woolf, Shaw, Twain, Garcia Lorca, Updike, Rushdie, and others.

Random House: 1991.
ISBN: 9780679411123. 1319 pp.
Hardcover. Very good.