"Reading for My Life is a monumenal collection of Leonard's most significant writings--spanning five decades--from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for the New York Review of Books."--Jacket.

Introduction / E.L. Doctorow -- Reading for my life -- The Cambridge scene -- The demise of Greenwich Village -- Pasternak's hero : man against the monoliths -- Epitaph for the beat generation -- Richard Nixon's Six Crises -- Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City -- Nabokov's Ada -- Gabriel Garca Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing -- Supergirl meets the sociologist -- Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior -- Edward Said's Orientalism -- Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife -- Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise -- Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Jim Sleeper's In Search of New York -- Don DeLillo's Liibra -- AIDS is Everywhere -- On the beat at Ms. -- Nan Robertson's Getting Better -- Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses -- Thomas Pynchon's Vineland -- Gnter Grass : bad boys and fairy tales -- Peggy Noonan's What I Saw ar the Revolution -- No Turning Back, Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, with Jane O'Reilly -- Philip Roth's Patrimony -- Milan Kundera's Immortality -- Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost -- Ed Sullivan died for our sins -- Dear Bill (on the occasion of his innaguration) -- Meeting David Grossman -- Eduardo Galeano walks some words -- Amos Oz in the desert -- Family values, like the house of Atreus -- When studs listens, everyone else talks -- Amazing grace -- Morrison's Paradise Lost -- Ralph Ellison, sort of (plus Hemmingway and Salinger) -- Why socialism never happened here -- Maureen Howard's Big as Life -- Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days -- Blowing his nose in the wind -- Networks of terror -- Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing -- Jacob Timmerman, Renaissance troublemaker -- Jonathan Lethem's Men and Cartoons, The Disappointment Artist, and The Fortress of Solitude -- Citizen Doctorow -- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (on Vclav Havel) -- The last innocent white man -- Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union -- Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.