Introduction / by Adrienne Miller --
Towel season / Ron Carlson --
The song of Grendel / John Gardner --
The snows of Kilimanjaro / Ernest Hemingway --
Adult world (I) / David Foster Wallace --
Adult world (II) / David Foster Wallace --
Incarnations of burned children / David Foster Wallace --
A Jewish patient begins his analysis / Philip Roth --
Parker's back / Flannery O'Connor --
The jeweler / Pete Dexter --
All the pretty horses / Cormac McCarthy --
Downstream / Antonya Nelson --
The B.A.R. man / Richard Yates --
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien --
Marry the one who gets there first : outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik wedding album / Heidi Julavits --
The celebrity / John Dos Passos --
The remobilization of Jacob Horner / John Barth --
Soldier's joy / Tobias Wolff --
The bullet's flight / Denis Johnson --
Memento Mori / Jonathan Nolan --
The lonesome vigilante / John Steinbeck --
Monhegan light / Richard Russo --
Fleur / Louise Erdrich --
The widow Ching, pirate / Jorge Luis Borges --
Neighbors / Raymond Carver --
Lightning man / David Means --
The visit to the museum / Vladimir Nabokov --
Hardy in the evening / Tony Earley --
Morning in America / Tony Earley --
Rock Springs / Richard Ford --
Behold the husband in his perfect agony / Barry Hannah --
After the storm / John Updike --
Heart of a champion / T. Coraghessan Boyle --
Verona : a young woman speaks / Harold Brodkey --
His son, in his arms, in light, aloft / Harold Brodkey --
The misfits / Arthur Miller --
The last generation / Joy Williams --
The beggar said so / Isaac Bashevis Singer --
Cutting losses / Thomas McGuane --
A man in the way / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
Plains of Abraham / Russell Banks --
Bess / Jayne Anne Phillips --
Among the paths to Eden / Truman Capote --
I look out for Ed Wolfe / Stanley Elkin --
The deep sleep / Aleksandar Hemon --
The language of men / Norman Mailer --
Under the Pitons / Robert Stone --
The eighty-yard run / Irwin Shaw --
In the men's room of the sixteenth century / Don DeLillo --
The death of Justina / John Cheever --
The wish / Joanna Scott --
