Person and Place -- Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans -- The Pal -- One's Neighbor's Wife -- The Running Mate -- The Counsellor -- The Golf Course Owner -- The Child Bride -- The Mailman -- The Widow -- The Undertaker -- The Bankrupt Man -- The Tarbox Police -- Venezuela for Visitors -- The Chaste Planet -- Invasion of the Book Envelopes -- Golf Dreams -- Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Masters -- New England -- The First Kiss -- Out There -- Going Barefoot -- Common Land -- New England Churches -- A Mild Complaint -- Other People's Books -- Three Talks on American Masters -- Hawthorne's Creed -- Melville's Withdrawal -- Whitman's Egotheism -- Letters -- The Bear Who Hated Life -- Simple-Minded Jim -- Advancing Over Water -- Nothing Is Easy -- An Armful of Field Flowers -- Hem Battles the Pack; Wins, Loses -- The Doctor's Son -- The Shining Note -- Wilson and Nabokov -- Edmund Wilson's Fiction: A Personal Account -- An Earlier Day -- The Cuckoo and the Rooster -- An Introduction to Nabokov's Lectures -- The Fancy-Forger Takes the Lectern -- Proud Happiness -- Vale, VN -- Bellow, Vonnegut, Tyler, Le Guin, Cheever -- Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil -- Toppling Tower Seen by a Whirling Soul -- All's Well in Skyscraper National Park -- Family Ways -- Loosened Roots -- Imagining Things -- On Such a Beautiful Green Little Planet -- Some British -- Jake and Lolly Opt Out -- Indestructible Elena -- An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green -- Green Green -- Through the Mid-Life Crisis with James Boswell, Esq. -- Spark, Murdoch, Trevor, Drabble -- Topnotch Witcheries -- Worlds and Worlds -- Drabbling in the Mud -- Of Heresy and Loot -- Coming into Her Own -- Some Irish -- Small Cheer from the Old Sod -- Flann Again -- An Old-Fashioned Novel -- Jarry, Queneau, Celine, Pinget -- Human Capacities -- Thirty-four Years Late, Twice -- The Strange Case of Dr. Destouches and M. Celine -- Robert Pinget -- Northern Europeans -- A Primal Modern -- Saddled with the World -- Scheherazade -- Brecht's Dicta -- Discontent in Deutsch -- Disaffection in Deutsch -- Calvino, Grass, Boll -- Metropolises of the Mind -- Card Tricks -- Readers and Writers -- Fish Story -- The Squeeze Is On -- Eastern Europeans -- Polish Metamorphoses -- Czarist Shadows, Soviet Lilacs -- Czech Angels -- Lem and Pym, Stead and Jones -- Lem and Pym -- Selda, Lilia, Great Gram, and Other Ladies in Distress -- Eva and Eleanor and Everywoman -- Some Nachtmusik, From All Over -- No Dearth of Death -- Dark Smile, Devilish Saints -- Layers of Ambiguity -- Stalled Starters -- Frontiersmen -- Barthes, Berlin, Cioran -- Roland Barthes -- Texts and Men -- The Last of Barthes -- A Monk Manque -- Poets -- The Heaven of an Old Home -- Alone but Not Aloof -- Owlish and Fishy -- Sissman's Prose -- Sissman's Poetry -- Three Poems on Being a Poet, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko -- Stand Fast I Must -- Tales -- Magic Mirrors -- Fiabe Italiane -- A Feast of Reason -- Happy on Nono Despite Odosha -- The World Called Third -- African Accents -- Mixed Reports from the Interior -- Journeyers -- Raman and Daisy and Olivia and the Nawah -- India Going On -- The Far East -- Spent Arrows and First Buddings -- From Fumie to Sony -- The Giant Who Isn't There -- The Long and Reluctant Stasis of Wan-li -- Art and Act -- Gaiety in the Galleries -- Tote That Quill -- Wright on Writing -- Borges Warmed Over -- Pinter's Unproduced Proust Printed -- Suzie Creamcheese Speaks -- Female Pilgrims -- Long Views -- A Cloud of Witnesses -- Who Wants to Know? -- To the Tram Halt Together