These thirteen essays represent a very wide range of approaches to the fictions of Laurence Sterne, who has certainly evolved into the eighteenth century's most important influence on modern and postmodern literature. While each essay centers on his written texts or his lived contexts, they together offer homage to his endurance as an author emulated by many modern writers-Nietzsche, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Mann, Marías, Goytisolo, Fuentes, Rushdie, and Pamuk; indeed, what important writer in the past 150 years has not been influenced by Sterne?