The Review of Contemporary Fiction has become swept up in the ubiquitous fever of retrospection connected with the end of the decade, the century, and the millennium. Thus we've decided to devote our last issue of the 1990s to looking back over the past nineteen years and choosing some of our favorite essays by some of our favorite authors. The unifying theme here is Writers on Writing. In each of these essays one of the innovative authors of our time addresses the aesthetic, cultural, social, political, or technological aspects of fiction and fiction writing. The result, we think, is a remarkable dialogue on the state and practice of contemporary fiction as we prepare to enter a new century.