In his 2014 biography of John Updike, Adam Begley quotes Updike's assertion—made in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates—that “Nobody can read like a writer.” This book stands as an emphatic validation of Updike's statement.

It began several years ago, with a request from a university press to be a reader for a collection of essays on American author Peter Taylor. Among the pieces I read on that occasion was one by Ann Beattie, “Peter Taylor's ‘The Old Forest,’” which I thought was a stunning and revelatory essay on one of Taylor's most important short stories. What impressed me about it was that, in one elegantly written and brief piece (five pages in the eventually published book), Beattie managed to achieve several objectives equally well—and they were objectives that heretofore I had regarded as mutually exclusive. She provided an explication of Taylor's story that was extraordinarily useful in unraveling its complexities, subtleties, and virtues; but she also conveyed very unobtrusively yet productively a sense of her personal relationship to its author (he had been her teacher and mentor and they had later become colleagues and close friends). Above all, what differentiated her essay from others on literary subjects was that it was so obviously and uniquely the sort of analysis/appreciation which could only have been written by a fellow writer, someone who knew the territory, who understood how difficult it was to accomplish what Peter Taylor had accomplished because she had tried to do so herself.

Beattie's essay had additional value for me because I had grown impatient with what at the time often passed for literary criticism, writing couched in jargon that obscured rather than illuminated its subject. Her essay was truly a breath of fresh air; and it occurred to me that one way of keeping that fresh air circulating would be to ask some leading American fiction writers to select a favorite American short story and explain why they liked it. Twenty-nine writers responded positively to my invitation. The only instruction they were given was not to write a scholarly essay; the only restrictions I placed were that the stories selected be by American writers and that there not be more than one story by any single writer.