Odd jobs: essays and criticism

Five days in Finland at the age of fifty-fve

The parade

First wives and trolley cars

Your lover just called: a playlet

Being on TV I

Being on TV II

Books into film

A nameless rose

Overboard on Overboard

Fictional houses

Can architecture be criticized?

Is New York City inhabitable?

A sense of transparency

A short and happy ride

Women

Mother

The female body

Beauty

Spirituality

The Fourth of July

Our national monuments

The importance of fiction

High art versus popular culture

Popular music

The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986

Ted Williams, as of 1986

Edmund Wilson

Mr. Volente

Mr. Palomar

John Cheever I

John Cheever II

John Cheever III

John Cheever IV

How does the state imagine?

How does the writer imagine?

Should writers give lectures?

Emersonianism

Howells as anti-novelist

To Indian summer, by William Dean Howells

To Nature's diary, by Mikhail Prishvin

To The complete stories, by Franz Kafka

To Seven gothic tales, by Isak Dineson

To Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara

To The power and the glory, by Graham Greene

To Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, by Karl Barth

The gospel according to St. Matthew

Many Bens

The ugly duckling

The heartless man

The virtues of playing cricket on the village green

Twisted apples

The sinister sex

Cohn's doom

Summonses, indictments, extenuating circumstances

Back in Midland City

Last blague

What you deserve is what you get

Beattieniks

Leaving home

No more Mr. Knightleys

Louise in the new world, Alice on the magic molehill

Doing his thing

Yahweh over Dionysus, in disputed decision

Bound to please

Wrestling to be born

And nothing but

Art and artillery

Between Pinget's ears

Illuminating reversals

Michael Tournier

Small packages

Baggy monsters

Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard

Back to the classics

Genius without cause

Among the masters

To the Arctic

Lost among the romantics

A romp with job

Spark but no spark

Bad neighbors

The Jones boys

Seeking connections in an insecure country

Living death

Latin strategies

The great Paraguayan novel and other hardships

Resisting the big boys

How the other half lives

Out of the evil empire

Russian delinquents

Visiting the land of the free

Doubt and difficulty in Leningrad and Moscow

Chronicles and processions

Satan's work and stilted cisterns

Three tales from Nigeria

Chinese disharmonies

In love with the West

Far-fetched

As others see us

Studies in Post-Hitlerian self-condemnation in Austria and West Germany

Rational faith

Mutability and gloire

Dutchmen and Turks

Levels and levels

A pair of parrots

Memory palaces

In dispraise of the powers that be

Ungreat lives

Old world wickedness

VN again and again

Nice tries

The flaming chalice

Ecolalia

In Borges's wake

Modernist, postmodernist, what will they think of next?

States of mind

Final fragments

Slogging Sammy

Still stirring

Still staring

Writer-consciousness

A materialist look at eros

A long way home

The local view

Hymn to tilth

Damp and dull

Empire's end

Schulz's charred scraps

The process and the lock

Eliot without words

Goody Sergeant ; the powerful Katrinka ; K.S.W.

Witty Dotty

Was B.B. a crook?

The bimbo on the barge

Something substantial and useful about it

Bull in a type shop

Art's dawn

Computer heaven

Evolution be praised

Deep time and computer time

Appendix: literarily personal

Index.