"Originally pblished in 2012, in different form, by Text Publishing, Australia"--Title page verso.

U and Me: The hard lessons of idolizing John Updike -- Toni Morrison -- Jonathan Safran Foer -- Haruki Murakami -- Richard Ford -- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o -- Günter Grass -- Nadine Gordimer -- David Foster Wallace -- Doris Lessing -- Hisham Matar -- Mark Z. Danielewski -- John Irving -- Kazuo Ishiguro -- Charles Frazier -- Edmund White -- Geraldine Brooks -- E.L. Doctorow -- Imre Kertész -- Aleksandar Hemon -- Kiran Desai -- Philip Roth -- Dave Eggers -- Vikram Chandra -- Tom Wolfe -- Robert M. Pirsig -- Peter Carey -- Mo Yan -- Donna Leon -- David Mitchell -- John Updike -- Joyce Carol Oates -- Amy Tan -- Dan DeLillo -- Louise Erdrich -- Norman Mailer -- James Wood -- Margaret Atwood -- Mohsin Hamid -- Richard Powers -- Ian McEwan -- Michael Ondaatje -- Salman Rushdie -- Marilynne Robinson -- Edmundo Paz Soldán -- Susanna Clarke -- Orhan Pamuk -- Ayu Utami -- Jonathan Franzen -- Jeffrey Eugenides -- Edwidge Danticat -- Geoff Dyer -- A.S. Byatt -- Michael Cunningham -- Jennifer Egan.

National book critic John Freeman pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, including such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more.