The essayist, critic, novelist, short story writer, and biographer presents 203 essays on such writers as Gibbon, Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Woolf, Shaw, Twain, Garci+a7a Lorca, Updike, Rushdie, and others.

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