All the Time in the World

This collection brings together twelve stories written across E. L. Doctorow’s career, including six pieces that had not previously appeared in book form. Its characters repeatedly find themselves estranged from the social worlds around them: families preserve damaging secrets, immigrants negotiate belonging, criminals attempt reinvention and solitary figures construct private systems for surviving modern life.

The settings range across different decades and forms of American experience rather than belonging to one historical period. Stories including “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate,” “A House on the Plains,” “The Writer in the Family” and the title story use crime, memory, domestic conflict and moral uncertainty to examine how individuals resist or submit to the prevailing world.