Coetzee then moves to explore the work of six of twentieth-century-German literature's greatest writers, including Günter Grass and W.G. Sebald, followed by essays on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Lastly, Coetzee looks at the work of three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez and V.S. Naipaul.