"Glutton for punishment": Richard Yates
"Not a nice person": Muriel Spark
Our contemporaries, ourselves
Irish elegy: William Trevor
"Our cheapened dreams" : E.L. Doctorow
"Despair of living": Anita Brookner
An artist of the floating world: Kazuo Ishiguro
"City of light": Robert Drewe's The Shark Net
L.A. noir: Michael Connelly
Ringworm belt: memoirs by Mary Karr
Evolutionary fever: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map
"New memoir": Alice Sebold's Lucky
Property of: Valerie Martin's Property
Programmed by art: David Lodge's Thinks ...
An endangered species: short stories
News from everywhere: short stories
Mythmaking realist: Pat Barker
Crazy for love: Scott Spencer's A Ship Made of Paper
Amateurs: Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage
Memoirs of crisis: Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty
Emily Bronẗë's Wuthering Heights
"Tragic mulatta": Clotel, or, the President's Daughter
"You are the we of me": Carson McCullers
Remembering Robert Lowell
"About whom nothing is known": Balthus
In the ring and out: Jack Johnson
Muhammad Ali: "The Greatest"
The vampire's secret: (re)viewing Tod Browning's Dracula after forty years
Don DeLillo's Americana (1971) revisited
A Garden of Earthly Delights revisited
On the composition of I Lock my Door Upon Myself
Private writings, public betrayals
Pilgrimage to Walden Pond: 1962, 2003.