From the Book - 1st U.S. ed.
Introduction : toward a fusion / J.C. Hallman
Salinger and sobs / Charles D'Ambrosio
An essay in criticism / Virginia Woolf
On a stanza by John Keats / Sven Birkerts
In terms of the toenail : fiction and the figures of life / William H. Gass
The border trilogy by Cormac McCarthy / Dagoberto Gilb
"The metamorphosis" / Vladimir Nabokov
"How to express your emotions" : an excerpt from How Proust can change your life / Alain de Botton
Learning from Eliot / Seamus Heaney
Out of Kansas / Salman Rushdie
Portentous evil / J.C. Hallman
The other James / Michael Chabon
Truman Capote reconsidered / Cynthia Ozick
What Chekhov meant by life / James Wood
Herman Melville's Moby Dick / D.H. Lawrence
An excerpt from Out of sheer rage / Geoff Dyer
Robert Frost / Czeslaw Milosz
An excerpt from The year of reading Proust / Phyllis Rose
The humble animal / Randall Jarrell
Loving Dostoyevsky / Susan Sontag
An excerpt from How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry / Edward Hirsch
A slight sound at evening / E.B. White
Good-bye, Holden Caulfield. I mean it. Go! Good-bye! / Walter Kirn
Mr. Pater's last volume / Oscar Wilde
Into some wild places with Hemingway / Fred Setterberg
Lowell's graveyard / Robert Hass
Thoughts on The idiot by Dostoevsky / Herman Hesse
An author in search of a subject / Frank O'Connor
Waugh's comic wasteland / David Lodge
Somewhere behind / Milan Kundera
Herman Melville / Albert Camus
On Steinbeck's story "Flight" / Wallace Stegner.
