This may be the best collection of essays in the series!  Ozick has chosen well known, established writers and put together a group of essays which while lacking a central theme, are joined by the quality of the writing which includes two Nobel Prize winners.

1. Anwar Accawi, The Telephone (a phone changes the world of a Lebanese village in central ways)
2. Andre Aciman, Shadow Cities (an exile’s experience of post-Cairo world in a NYC park)
3. Helen Barolini, How I Learned to Speak Italian (‘How unexpected it all turned out….)
4. Saul Bellow, Graven Images (a bust in the Chicago Public Library leads to musing on images)
5. Jeremy Bernstein, The Merely Very Good (Stephen Spender/Auden; Robert Oppenheimer/Paul Dirac)
6. Sven Birkerts, States of Reading (the world of the novel and the reader)
7. M. Coetzee, What is Realism (a 2003 novel segment, ? essay)
8. Brian Doyle, Altar Boy (a detailed description of the life of an altar boy in suburban NY in the form of a mass)
9. Andre Dubus, Witness (the author encounters a woman who was at the site of his fateful accident)
10. Joseph Epstein, Will You Still Feed Me (the author turns 60 and life changes)
11. Ian Frazier, Someplace in Queens (a flaneur experiences NY’s least known borough much to his delight)
12. William H. Gass, The Test of Time (what makes a great work of literature?)
13. Elizabeth Graver, Two Baths (a woman goes to the Turkish baths at 20 and at 30)
14. Edward Hoagland, A Peaceable Kingdom (opening the summer house in VT)
15. Jamaica Kincaid, In History (?)
16. William Maxwell, Nearing Ninety (JE should talk to him!)
17. John McPhee, Silk Parachute (a 99 year old mother occasions a look back to a perfect childhood toy)
18. Mary Oliver, Building the House (the poet builds an outbuilding, a carpenter writes poetry)
19. Tim Robinson, Orion the Hunter (our magnificent universe is observed)
20. Oliver Sacks, Water Babies (swimming in Micronesia, NYC, and with his father)
21. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Page Turner (a microscopic analysis of a piano concert page turner)
22. Louis Simpson, Soldier’s Heart (a WWII PTSD memoir)
23. DianaTrilling, A Visit to Camelot (detailed description of JFK and Jackie at a White House party)
24. John Updike, Lost Art (cartooning)
25. James Wood, Real Life (Chekhov yes, Ibsen no)