Uncensored Sylvia Plath --
"Restoring" Willie Stark --
"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 Brontë'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" -- (Re) visits --
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.