One of California’s leading writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and an authority on American and English literature, presents her first nonfiction volume on writing since 2005’s best-selling Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Jane Smiley has long been acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists. Less known is her nonfiction, her steady and penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Her approach is both enthusiastic and meticulous, always quick to dive beneath surface-level interpretations of authors and their work. This volume of nonfiction begins with a personal introduction that traces Smiley’s migration from Missouri to California a quarter-century ago. She soon found herself grappling with the rich and varied literature of a state whose writers were engaging with a contested history of race, class, identity, and sex. As she considers the ambiguity of character and the weight of history, her essays provide new entry points into literature, and we lucky readers can see how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford. Throughout, Smiley seeks to think harder and, in her words, with more clarity and nuance about the questions that matter most.