Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” “What Helen Keller Saw,” “Dostoevsky’s Unabomber,” and “Transcending the Kafkaesque,” Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including “A Hebrew Sibyl,” “What Happened to the Baby?,” “Dictation,” “The Biographer’s Hat,” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth.

"If there is such a thing as a literary pantheon in America, then Cynthia Ozick is surely its Athena . . . Ozick casts sentences that fairly pulse with the electricity of a highly charged mind." - The Washington Post

"Ozick is double-barreled. She's an inventive and revelatory fiction writer and an exacting, battle-ready critic; an impish writer of conscience and a creative intellectual." - Los Angeles Times

"As an essayist, Ozick is a very good storyteller. Her arguments are plots . . . They twist and turn, digress, slow down and speed up, surprise with sudden illuminations." - The New York Times Book Review

"She is out to reclaim the lost glory of the essay and restore some of its original sinewy meaning. You can hear the ground shaking with her mental fight, the crunch of her opinions." - Independent