According to Rosenthal, Stern, along with Joshua Taylor, another faculty member, wanted to suppress the winter issue, being himself "so quick to protect the administration."

It recounts Stern's successful attempt not only to save the review (the University President at the time, Lawrence A. Kimpton, wished to stop funding the journal) but to keep the following issue from dropping any of the pieces (of Naked Lunch and other "beat" works) that had been accepted.

Like his other essay collections, this one demonstrates that his astute observations in fiction are equal to, and derived from, his acute views on news and culture.

In 1985, Stern received the Medal of Merit for the Novel, awarded to a novelist every six years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Stern has been praised by many of the great writers and critics of the last fifty years, among them Anthony Burgess, Flannery O'Connor, Howard Nemerov, Thomas Berger, Hugh Kenner, Sven Birkerts, and Richard Ellmann, as well as his close friends Tom Rogers, Saul Bellow, Donald Justice, and Philip Roth (see Stern's essay "Glimpse, Encounter, Acquaintance, Friendship" in Sewanee Review, Winter 2009).

He also enjoyed literary acquaintances and friendships with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Lillian Hellman, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Some of Stern's students at the University of Chicago went on to become distinguished writers themselves such as Douglas Unger, Robert Coover, Austin Wright, Campbell McGrath, Peter LaSalle, and Alane Rollings, as well as the well-known journalists Seymour Hersh, David Brooks and Mike Taibbi.