xxiii, 501 p. : ill., facs. ; 25 cm.

Real Conversation -- The Writer in Winter -- A Desert Encounter -- Nessus at Noon -- The Football Factory -- The Beloved -- The Lens Factory -- Five Poems : Basium XVI ; Head of a Girl, at the Met ; Cafeteria, Mass. General Hospital ; An Hour Without Color ; Not Cancelled Yet --

Book Chat -- Humor in Fiction -- Lives and Laurels : Soren Kierkegaard ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Ernest Hemingway ; Kurt Vonnegut ; L. E. Sissman ; Raymond Carver -- Forewords and afterwords : The Haunted Major, by Robert Marshall ; The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball ; The Lu...

Gallery Tours -- Old Masters : A Wistful Wurzburger ; Singular in Everything ; More Light on Delft ; Plain and Simplified -- Romantics and Realists : "Therefore I Print" ; Innerlichkeit and Eigentumlichkeit ; Splendid Lies ; A Lean and Optical Dane ; Lear Far and Near ; The Artist as Trailblazer --...

Pet Topics -- The Universe : The Valiant Swabian ; Visions of Mars ; Extreme Dinosaurs -- The Commonwealth : Harvard Square in the Fifties ; Ipswich in the Seventies ; Three Texts from Early Ipswich ; Lovell Thompson ; Open Spaces ; Memoirs of a Massachusetts Golfer -- The Game : In Love with a Want...

Table Talk -- The End of Authorship -- In Defense of the Amateur Reader -- A Poetics of Book Reviewing -- An American View of English Fiction -- Comment on "Poetry's Failure in the Marketplace" -- Foreword to the 1982 Edition of The Carpentered Hen -- Introduction to the 1977 Edition of The Poorhous...