Introduction / George Plimpton --
Letter to an editor / William Styron --
Heartbreak: Terrific mother / Lorrie Moore --
Elms / Jonathan Galassi --
The fine art of sighing / Bernard Cooper --
Intensive care / Heather McHugh --
Careful / Raymond Carver --
Madness: Zelda: A worksheet / Zelda Fitzgerald --
Lunar caustic / Malcolm Lowry --
Delirium / Barbara Hamby --
Autobiography / Susan Mitchell --
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? / Bobbie Ann Mason --
Ascent of Mount Carmel / Robert Stone --
Sex: Alice / Donald Barthelme --
Rimininny! / S. X. Rosenstock --
Two cunts in Paris / John Updike --
Art of fiction CLXIII / William T. Vollmann --
Art of fiction CLXXII / Louis Begley --
Art of fiction XL / Vladimir Nabokov --
With a potpourri down under / Richard Howard --
LeJet d'eau / Anthony Hecht --
Ring of brightest angels around heaven / Rick Moody --
Art of fiction CXXXIV / Toni Morrison --
Art of fiction CXXI / Margaret Atwood --
Liberal education / Mordecai Richler --
Love: Little expressionless animals / David Foster Wallace --
Cyprian / Rosanna Warren --
Art of poetry LXXI / Ted Hughes --
Art of fiction CL / Jeanette Winterson --
Art of fiction CV / Edmund White --
To the French language / Kenneth Koch --
Los dos rancheros / Charlie Smith --
Pearls / Michael Cunningham --
Everything / A. R. Ammons --
Betrayal: Lorena / Lucille Clifton --
Migraine sonnets / Marilyn Hacker --
Chez Lambert / Jonathan Franzen --
You must relax! / Joanna Scott --
Marriage song / Beth Gylys --
Beet queen / Louise Erdrich --
Outsiders: Tugboat syndrome / Jonathan Lethem --
Art of fiction XVII / Truman Capote --
Against winter / Charles Simic --
Thirty-three / Adrienne Rich --
Funes the memorious / Jorge Luis Borges --
Spaceships have landed / alice Munro --
Intoxication: It's six a.m., Do you know where you are? / Jay McInerney --
Edmund Wilson / Mary McCarthy --
Art of fiction XII / William Faulkner --
Art of fiction XCIII / John Irving --
Art of journalism I / Hunter S. Thompson --
Art of fiction XXXVI / William Burroughs --
Basketball diaries / Jim Carroll --
Car-crash while hitchhiking / Denis Johnson --
War: Last comes the raven / Italo Calvino --
Blind white fish in Belgium / Paul West --
Art of fiction CXL / Primo Levi --
Art of poetry V / Ezra Pound --
Art of fiction LXIV / Kurt Vonnegut --
Ends / Peter Ho Davies --
Pearl Harbor / Frank O'Hara --
Conquerer / W. S. Merwin --
Art of theater III / Harold Pinter --
Dead soldier's talk / Ha Jin --
Art of fiction CXLIX / John Le Carré --
Art of fiction CXLIII / Susan Sontag --
Terminus / Nicholas Christopher --
Prayer to the sun / Geoffrey Hill --
Whimsy: How to travel with a salmon / Umberto Eco --
Admonitory hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby / Edward Gorey --
Milking the moon / Eugene Walter --
Pomework: An exercise in occasional poetry / Various --
Plato club / James Merrill and David Jackson --
Horrors: Little girl / Grace Paley --
Lackawanna / Galway Kinnell --
Art of fiction CLXXIII / Ian McEwan --
Heat / Joyce Carol Oates --
Home and away / Rachel Wetzsteon --
Broom: The new wife's tale / Charles Tomlinson --
Ailanthus / Vijay Seshadri --
In the country of last things --
God: Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth --
Fallacy of thinking flesh is flesh / Pattiann Rogers --
Roadside resurrection / Larry Brown --
Saint / Gabriel Garcia Márquez --
Memory cave / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Death: City midnight junk strains / Allen Ginsberg --
Virgin suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides --
Picnic, lightning / Billy Collins --
Art of poetry LXXV / Seamus Heaney --
Art of fiction CLXVII / A. S. Byatt --
Letter after an estrangement / Priscilla Becker --
Letter after an estrangement / Priscilla Becker --
Aqua Boulevard / Maile Meloy --
Saving / Robert Pinsky --
Sacred heart / Thom Gunn --
Return / John Montague --
Work in progress / Norman Mailer --
Dinner: In the belly of the cat / Daniel S. Libman --
Art of fiction XLVIII / Anthony Burgess --
Non- vegetarian / Marie Ponsot --
Devil's larder / Jim Crace --
Baseball: Batting against Castro / Jim Shepard --
Curt Flood / Anne Waldman --
Third Inning / Donald Hall --
Hector Quesadilla story / T. Coraghessan Boyle --
Travels: Mexican girl / Jack Kerouac --
Rostropovich at checkpoint Charlie, November 11, 1989 / Joel Brouwer --
TV men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2) / Anne Carson --
History of paisley / Agha Shahid Ali --
Interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez --
Art of fiction LXXVIII / James Baldwin --
Art of poetry XXX / Philip Larkin --
Art of fiction CLIV / V. S. Naipaul --
Her real name / Charles D'Ambrosio --
Art of writing: Musica reservata / John Ashbery --
At a reading / J. D. McClatchy --
Making it / John Hollander --
Correspondence / Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson --
On the literary life / John Cheever --
Art of fiction CLXXIII / Ian McEwan --
Art of fiction LXIX / Gabriel Garcia M{226]arquez --
Art of fiction CXX / Mario Vargas Llosa --
Art of theater V / Tennessee Williams --
Radio interview / Gertrude Stein --
Art of poetry XLII / Octavio Paz --
Art of fiction XCIV / E. L. Doctorow --
Art of fiction LI / Joseph Heller --
Art of fiction CXXX / Italo Calvino --
Art of fiction CXXXIX / Chinua Achebe --
Art of fiction LXVII / Paul Bowles --
Art of fiction XLIII / John Updike --
Art of fiction CVI / John mortimer --
Art of poetry X / Robert Creely --
Art of fiction XVI / Thornton Wilder --
Art of theater XII / Wendy Wasserstein --
Art of fiction XXI / Ernest Hemingway --
Art of fiction CXXXIII / James Salter --
Art of fiction CXXXV / Don DeLillo --
Art of fiction XXVIII / Henry Miller --
Art of fiction XII / William Faulkner --
Art of fiction LXXXVII / Elizabeth Hardwick.