The loneliest book I've read --
Footnote on Sylvie Selig --
The figure in the castle --
The greatest animal novelist of all time --
II. It can still take me there --
The only human superhero --
Forget this introduction --
What's old is new (NYRB) --
III. Objects in furious motion --
Attention drifting beautifully (Donald Barthelme) --
My hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard --
Steven Millhauser's ghost stories --
The mechanics of fear, revisited --
Walter Tevis's Mockingbird --
Everything said and exhausted (Daniel Fuchs) --
How did I get here and what could it possibly mean? (Bernard Wolfe) --
'Twas ever thus (Tanguy Viel's Beyond Suspicion) --
Russell Greenan's Geniuses --
V. Ecstatic depictions of consciousness --
On two sentences from Charles D'Ambrosio's "Screenwriter" --
Remarks perhaps of some assistance to the reader of Joseph McElroy's Ancient history: a paraphase --
VI. Thomas Berger and I have never met (Ishiguro, Berger and PKD) --
High priest of the paranoids --
The man whose teeth were all exactly alike --
Letters from the invisible man: my correspondence with Thomas Berger --
The original piece of wood I left in your head: a conversation between director Spike Jonze and critic Perkus Tooth --
Johnny's graying teenaged sense of what isn't boring (Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002) --
Close reading (Ricks on Dylan) --
New old friend (a toast to Kenneth Koch) --
Something about a slice --
Anthony Burgess answers two questions --
