Heartbreak -- Terrific mother / Lorrie Moore -- Elms / Jonathan Galassi -- The fine art of sighing / Bernard Cooper -- Intensive care / Heather McHugh -- Careful / Raymond Carver -- To Urania / Joseph Brodsky -- 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 -- The ascent of Mount Carmel / Robert Stone -- Sex -- Alice / Donald Barthelme -- Rimininny! / S.X. Rosenstock -- Two cunts in Paris / John Updike -- The art of fiction CLXIII / William T. Vollmann -- The art of fiction CLXXII / Louis Begley -- The art of fiction XL / Vladimir Nabokov -- With a potpourri down under / Richard Howard -- Le jet d'eau / Anthony Hecht -- The ring of brightest angels around heaven / Rick Moody -- The art of fiction CXXXIV / Toni Morrison -- The art of fiction CXXI / Margaret Atwood -- A liberal education / Mordecai Richler -- Love -- Little expressionless animals / David Foster Wallace -- Cyprian / Rosanna Warren -- The art of poetry LXXI / Ted Hughes -- The art of fiction CL / Jeanette Winterson -- The 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 -- The Beet Queen / Louise Erdrich -- Outsiders -- Tugboat syndrome / Jonathan Lethem -- The 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 -- The guest / Stanley Elkin -- The art of fiction XII / William Faulkner -- The art of fiction XCIII / John Irving -- The art of journalism I / Hunter S. Thompson -- The art of fiction XXXVI / William Burroughs -- The basketball diaries / Jim Carroll -- Car-crash while hitchhiking / Denis Johnson -- War -- Last comes the raven / Italo Calvino -- Blind white fish in Belgium / Paul West -- The art of fiction CXL / Primo Levi -- The art of poetry V / Ezra Pound -- The art of fiction LXIV / Kurt Vonnegut -- The ends / Peter Ho Davies -- Pearl Harbor / Frank O'Hara -- Conquerer / W.S. Merwin -- The art of theater III / Harold Pinter -- The dead soldier's talk / Ha Jin -- The art of fiction CXLIX / John Le Carré -- The art of fiction CXLIII / Susan Sontag -- Terminus / Nicholas Christopher -- A prayer to the sun / Geoffrey Hill -- Whimsy -- How to travel with a salmon / Umberto Eco -- The admonitory hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby / Edward Gorey -- Milking the moon / Eugene Walter -- Pomework: an exercise in occasional poetry / Various -- The Plato Club / James Merrill and David Jackson -- Horrors -- The little girl / Grace Paley -- Lackawanna / Galway Kinnell -- The art of fiction CLXXIII / Ian McEwan -- Heat / Joyce Carol Oates -- Home and away / Rachel Wetzsteon -- The broom: the new wife's tale / Charles Tomlinson -- Ailanthus / Vijay Seshadri -- In the country of last things / Paul Auster.

God -- The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- The fallacy of thinking flesh is flesh / Pattiann Rogers -- A roadside resurrection / Larry Brown -- The breath / Robert Bly -- The saint / Gabriel García Márquez -- Memory cave / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Snakes / Susan Power -- Death -- City midnight junk strains / Allen Ginsberg -- The virgin suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides -- Picnic, lightning / Billy Collins -- The art of poetry LXXV / Seamus Heaney -- The art of fiction CLXVII / A.S. Byatt -- Letter after an estrangement / Priscilla Becker -- Aqua Boulevard / Maile Meloy -- The saving / Robert Pinsky -- Sacred Heart / Thom Gunn -- Return / John Montague -- A work in progress / Norman Mailer -- Dinner -- In the belly of the cat / Daniel S. Libman -- Oysters / Gary Snyder -- The art of fiction XLVIII / Anthony Burgess -- Non-vegetarian / Marie Ponsot -- The Devil's larder / Jim Crace -- Baseball -- Batting against Castro / Jim Shepard -- Curt Flood / Anne Waldman -- The third inning / Donald Hall -- The Hector Quesadilla story / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- Travels -- The Mexican girl / Jack Kerouac -- Exodus / Robyn Selman -- Rostropovich at Checkpoint Charlie, November 11, 1989 / Joel Brouwer -- TV men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2) / Anne Carson -- A history of paisley / Agha Shahid Ali -- The interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez -- The art of fiction LXXVIII / James Baldwin -- The art of poetry XXX / Philip Larkin -- The art of fiction CLIV / V.S. Naipaul -- Her real name / Charles D'Ambrosio -- The 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 -- The art of fiction CLXXIII / Ian McEwan -- The art of fiction / Gabriel García Márquez -- The art of fiction CXX / Mario Vargas Llosa -- The art of theater V / Tennessee Williams -- A radio interview / Gertrude Stein -- The art of poetry XLII / Octavio Paz -- The art of fiction XCIV / E.L. Doctorow -- The art of fiction LI / Joseph Heller -- The art of fiction CXXX / Italo Calvino -- The art of fiction CXXXIX / Chinua Achebe -- The art of fiction LXVII / Paul Bowles -- The art of fiction XLIII / John Updike -- The art of fiction CVI / John Mortimer -- The art of poetry X / Robert Creeley -- The art of fiction XVI / Thornton Wilder -- The art of theater XII / Wendy Wasserstein -- The art of fiction XXI / Ernest Hemingway -- The art of fiction CXXXIII / James Salter -- The art of fiction CXXXV / Don DeLillo -- The art of fiction XXVIII / Henry Miller -- The art of fiction XII / William Faulkner -- The art of fiction LXXXVII / Elizabeth Hardwick.