John Leonard was a lion of American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard's most significant writings spanning five decades from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for the New York Review of Books. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, among others, display Leonard's encyclopedic knowledge of literature and make this book a landmark...

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker)
Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century s definitive chroniclers of the city the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than thirty refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among...

"NEW YORK TIMES "BESTSELLER
With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration is a well-known novelist, whose...