Here for the first time are all of Dennis Littrell's reviews of plays, novels, and short story collections in one handy volume Included among the seventy-seven reviews (over sixty thousand words; 213 pages) are mini essays on and about some of the greats of literature, including reviews of works by Leon Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alberto Moravia, etc. Additionally Littrell reviews mystery and popular writers such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith along with reviews of works by virtual unknowns. Nobel Prize winners reviewed include works by J.M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, William Golding, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Bestselling writers include Tracy Chevalier, Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Franzen, Arthur Golden, Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, etc. Littrell's style is satirical and didactic by turns so that the collection amounts to both a delicious read with many wry and pointed observations and something akin to a sophisticated course in fiction writing.