Writers Editor's Recommended Book, Amazon.com, 9/01/96:

Most literary criticism sends me into a coma, but John Gardner talks about literature in a way that anyone who likes books can follow and appreciate. Until his death in a 1982 motorcycle crash at age 49, Gardner suffered from neither a lack of productivity--he wrote more than 20 books--nor for want of opinions about the literary productions of others. In this collection of his essays and lectures, Gardner provides several upper-level English lit seminars' worth of commentary on a number of books and authors--Melville, Roth, Oates, Styron, Calvino, Cheever, to name a few.