Contemporary Literary Criticism covers authors who are currently active or who died after December 31, 1959.

Each print volume in this long-standing series profiles approximately 6-8 novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative and nonfiction writers by providing full-text or excerpted criticism taken from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals. Approximately 90-95% of critical essays are full text. Each of the approximately 200 essays per volume is prefaced by a full citation and annotation and most entries in the print series include an author portrait. Other features of CLC in print include:

• A format familiar to librarians
• Fully indexes by author name, title and nationality
• Coverage of nearly 3, 000 authors
• More than 200 volumes in print since 1974

Each volume includes cumulative author name, topic, and nationality indexes, as well as a volume-specific title index. A cumulative title index to the entire series is available separately