Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin's Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

M. M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a Russian literary critic and philosopher.

Vern W. McGee(1939–2015) studied Russian and comparative literature; he received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.

Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

Michael Holquist (1935–2016) was a professor of comparative literature at Yale University and a leading scholar of Bakhtin's works.

• Note on Translation
• Introduction by Michael Holquist
• Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff
• The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)
• The Problem of Speech Genres
• The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis
• From Notes Made in 1970-71
• Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences
• Index