America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition-from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man-in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction. Whether you have already read these books, are planning to, or simply care about the importance and power of fiction, Harold Bloom is your unparalleled guide to understanding them with new intimacy. In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom-who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic-gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, uncanny erudition, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works spanning the Western canon, from Don Quixote to The Book of Numbers; from Wuthering Heights to Absalom, Absalom!; from Les Miserables to Blood Meridian; from Vanity Fair to Invisible Man. Here are trenchant appreciations of fiction by, among many others, Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Le Guin, and Sebald.