Includes index.

Introduction by Charles Johnson; Bartleby: Art and Social Commitment; An Invective Against Mere Fiction; More Smog from the Dark Satanic Mills; Witchcraft in Bullet Park, by John Cheever; Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll; The Breast, by Phillip Roth; The Way We Write Now; Saint Walt; The Adventurer, by Paul Zweig; Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode; Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam); JR, by William Gaddis; The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, by John Steinbeck; Lancelot, by Walker Percy; Falconer, by John Cheever; The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Italo Calvino; Daniel Martin, by John Fowles; The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkein; The Stories of John Cheever; Dublins Lives, by Bernard Malmud; Sophies Choice, by William Styron; A Writers View of Contemporary American Fiction; Bellefleur, by Joyce Carol Oates; Italian Folktales, by Italo Calvino; Fiction in MSS; What Writers Do; Cartoons; Julius Caesar and the Werewolf; General Plan for The Sunlight Dialogues

This collection brings together Gardner's essays on literature. He explains how he separates novelistic wheat from chaff, genuine fiction from fakery. Gardner examines contemporary writers - Bellow, Nabokov, Roth, Cheever, Woiwode, Oates, Updike, and other major authors