George Plimpton, Introduction
William Styron, Letter to an Editor

Heartbreak

Lorrie Moore, Terrific Mother
Jonathan Galassi, Elms
Bernard Cooper, The Fine Art of Sighing
Heather McHugh, Intensive Care
Raymond Carver, Careful
Joseph Brodsky, To Urania

Madness

Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda: A Worksheet
Malcolm Lowry, Lunar Caustic
Barbara Hamby, Delirium
Susan Mitchell, Autobiography
Bobbie Ann Mason, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?
Robert Stone, The Ascent of Mount Carmel

Sex

Donald Barthelme, Alice
S.X. Rosenstock, Rimininny!
John Updike, Two Cunts in Paris
William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction CLXIII
Louis Begley, The Art of Fiction CLXXII
Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction XL
Richard Howard, With a Potpourri Down Under
Anthony Hecht, Le Jet d'Eau
Rick Moody, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven
Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction CXXXIV
Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction CXXI
Mordecai Richler, A Liberal Education

Love

David Foster Wallace, Little Expressionless Animals
Rosanna Warren, Cyprian
Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry LXXI
Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction CL
Edmund White, The Art of Fiction CV
Kenneth Koch, To the French Language
Charlie Smith, Los Dos Rancheros
Michael Cunningham, Pearls
A.R. Ammons, Everything

Betrayal

Lucille Clifton, Lorena
Marilyn Hacker, Migraine Sonnets
Jonathan Franzen, Chez Lambert
Joanna Scott, You Must Relax!
Beth Gylys, Marriage Song
Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen

Outsiders

Jonathan Lethem, Tugboat Syndrome
Truman Capote, The Art of Fiction XVII
Charles Simic, Against Winter
Adrienne Rich, Thirty-three
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
Alice Munro, Spaceships Have Landed

Intoxication

Jay McInerney, It's Six a.m., Do You Know and Where You Are?
Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson
Stanley Elkin, The Guest
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction XII
John Irving, The Art of Fiction XCIII
Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism I
William Burroughs, The Art of Fiction XXXVI
Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Denis Johnson, Car-Crash While Hitchhiking

War

Italo Calvino, Last Comes the Raven
Paul West, Blind White Fish in Belgium
Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction CXL
Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry V
Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction LXIV
Peter Ho Davies, The Ends
Frank O'Hara, Pearl Harbor
W.S. Merwin, Conquerer
Harold Pinter, The Art of Theater III
Ha Jin, The Dead Soldier's Talk
John Le Carré, The Art of Fiction CXLIX
Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction CXLIII
Nicholas Christopher, Terminus
Geoffrey Hill, A Prayer to the Sun

Whimsy

Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon
Edward Gorey, The Admonitory Hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby
Eugene Walter Milking the Moon
Various, Pomework: An Exercise in Occasional Poetry
James Merrill and David Jackson, The Plato Club

Horrors

Grace Paley, The Little Girl
Galway Kinnell, Lackawanna
Ian McEwan, The Art of Fiction CLXXIII
Joyce Carol Oates, Heat
Rachel Wetzsteon, Home and Away
Charles Tomlinson, The Broom: The New Wife's Tale
Vijay Seshadri, Ailanthus
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

God

Philip Roth, The Conversion of the Jews
Pattiann Rogers, The Fallacy of Thinking Flesh Is Flesh
Larry Brown, A Roadside Resurrection
Robert Bly, The Breath
Gabriel García Márquez, The Saint
Yusef Komunyakaa, Memory Cave
Susan Power, Snakes

Death

Allen Ginsberg, City Midnight Junk Strains
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning
Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry LXXV
A.S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction CLXVII
Priscilla Becker, Letter After an Estrangement
Maile Meloy, Aqua Boulevard
Robert Pinsky, The Saving
Thom Gunn, Sacred Heart
John Montague, Return
Norman Mailer, A Work in Progress

Dinner

Daniel S. Libman, In the Belly of the Cat
Gary Snyder, Oysters
Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction XLVIII
Marie Ponsot, Non-Vegetarian
Jim Crace, The Devil's Larder

Baseball

Jim Shepard, Batting Against Castro
Anne Waldman, Curt Flood
Donald Hall, The Third Inning
T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Hector Quesadilla Story

Travels

Jack Kerouac, The Mexican Girl
Robyn Selman, Exodus
Joel Brouwer, Rostropovich at Checkpoint Charlie, November 11, 1989
Anne Carson, TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)
Agha Shahid Ali, A History of Paisley
Barry Lopez, The Interior of North Dakota
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction LXXVIII
Philip Larkin, The Art of Poetry XXX
V.S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction CLIV
Charles D'Ambrosio, Her Real Name

The Art of Writing

John Ashbery, Musica Reservata
J.D. McClatchy, At a Reading
John Hollander, Making It
Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson, Correspondence
John Cheever, On the Literary Life
Ian McEwan, The Art of Fiction CLXXIII
Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction LXIX
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction CXX
Tennessee Williams, The Art of Theater V
Gertrude Stein, A Radio Interview
Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry XLII
E.L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction XCIV
Joseph Heller, The Art of Fiction LI
Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction CXXX
Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction CXXXIX
Paul Bowles, The Art of Fiction LXVII
John Updike, The Art of Fiction XLIII
John Mortimer, The Art of Fiction CVI
Robert Creeley, The Art of Poetry X
Thornton Wilder, The Art of Fiction XVI
Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater XII
Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction XXI
James Salter, The Art of Fiction CXXXIII
Don Delillo, The Art of Fiction CXXXV
Henry Miller, The Art of Fiction XXVIII
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction XII
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Art of Fiction LXXXVII

The Contributors
Acknowledgments