Table of Contents
1 The Gamble 1
2 A Note on John Ashbery 16
3 Samuel R. Delany K. Leslie Steiner 21
4 More and Less Than Human 42
5 Acceptance Speech at Temple University 53
6 Fiction's Present: A Brief Note 55
7 Two Introductions for Junot Diaz 60
8 A Lost Lady and Modernism: Willa Cather 64
9 Interview with Matthew Cheney 85
10 On Three Novels: Great House, So Much for That, and Parrot and Olivier in America 91
11 The Paris Review Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (Uncut) 113
12 The Mirror and the Maze, I 138
13 Brudner Prize Lecture, I: A View from the Valley's Edge, Part 1 144
14 Brudner Prize Lecture, II: A View from the Valley's Edge, Part 2 154
15 A Note on William Gaddis 169
16 Interview with Reed Cooley 177
17 Notes on Heart of Darkness: A Facebook and Email Thread 180
18 Remembering Pete Seeger 204
19 A, B, C …: Preface and Afterword to Three Short Novels 208
20 A Note on Melville 247
21 Absence and Fiction: More Recent Thoughts on The American Shore 266
22 The Mirror and the Maze, II 272
23 Ikky, Kong, Frédéric, Kurtz 298
24 Notes on The City of Green Fire 319
25 Sympathy and Power: A Facebook Post 330
26 Ash Wednesday 340
Acknowledgments 357
Index 359
Illustrations for chapter 24 follow page 326
