In her Letters to Men and Women of Letters, Diane Joy Charney writes to the authors she admires, both living and dead, who continue to keep her company. Her letters reflect what these writers have taught Charney about herself, but also what they can offer the reader. Each letter—part literary love affair, part entertaining memoir—shows Charney’s reaction to having studied and taught the work of these timeless writers. She was a latecomer to many of them, but it’s never too late to fall in love with great writers.

Among these are Franz Kafka, George Eliot, Proust, Nabokov, Camus, Colette, Flaubert, Edith Wharton, Balzac, Leonard Cohen, Christo, and her father. Her letters have been described as quirky (“Dear Jean-Paul Sartre, There have been many Jean-Pauls in my life, but you’re the only one in whose bedroom I have slept”), warm, accessible, and funny.