“The critic is a reader before he is a writer, a spirited lover of literature, and criticism is one important use to which he puts his reading and his love,” William Giraldi writes in the introduction to his collection of essays on American writers, literary critics, and cultural themes spanning several decades. In the book’s three sections—American Moments, American Critics, and American Stories—Giraldi discusses Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, and Elizabeth Spencer, among others, as well as topics such as commercial fiction, Catholic novelists, bibliophilia, and the art of hate mail.