In his second volume of literary essays, following Stranger Shores (2001), Nobel laureate Coetzee conducts deep readings primarily of major twentieth-century European and American writers. Cosmopolitan in range and erudite in texture, Coetzee's biocritical explications delve into the art, times, and humanity of, among others, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, and W. G. Sebald. As a South African expat, Coetzee is attuned to literature under pressure as writers write in lands other than home, contending with language gaps and facing a world in violent upheaval. In his American essays, Coetzee brings an unusual perspective to Walt Whitman's eroticism, Faulkner's vision of the South, Philip Roth's Plot against America, and Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Misfits. In each case, Coetzee tells a story as much as he interprets the work, riding in the slipstream of his subject's life and writings as he parses matters personal, technical, aesthetic, moral, and political with both subtlety and vigour.