Classics. A Poe memoir ; The woman in white : Emily Dickinson and friends ; Cast a cold eye : Jean Stafford ; The art of vengeance : Roald Dahl ; Revisiting Nabokov's Lolita ; Shirley Jackson's witchcraft : We have always lived in the castle ; "As you are grooved, so you are grieved" : the art and the craft of Bernard Malamud ; "Large and startling figures" : the fiction of Flannery O'Connor ; Boxing : history, art, culture
Contemporaries. Remembering John Updike ; Homer & Langley : E.L. Doctorow ; In rough country I : Cormac McCarthy ; In rough country II : Annie Proulx ; Enchanted! : Salman Rushdie ; Philip Roth's tragic jokes ; A photographer's lives : Annie Leibovitz ; "The great heap of days" : James Salter's fiction ; Margaret Atwood's tales ; In the emperor's dream house : Claire Messud ; After the apocalypse : Jim Crace ; The story of X : Susanna Moore's In the cut ; "It doesn't feel personal" : the poetry of Sharon Olds ; Too much happiness : the stories of Alice Munro
Nostalgias. Nostalgia 1970 : city on fire ; The myth of the "American idea" : 2007 ; "Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?" : address upon receiving the 2007 Humanist of the Year Award ; In the absence of mentors/monsters : notes on writerly influences ; Revisiting Lockport, New York.