
"Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a range of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner's responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content-from Lessing's and Gordimer's concrete political lessons to Szymborska's larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)-each contains observations that are at once totally complex and recognizably true." - Jessi Haley