Table of Contents
Where is an author? -- "In olden times, when wishing was having...": classic and contemporary fairy tales -- The aesthetics of fear -- Art and ethics? The f(u)tility of art -- The romance of art: four brief pieces: The romance of art ; First principles ; Transformations of play ; The artist as perpetual antagonist -- "Zero at the bone": despair as sin and enlightenment -- Art and "victim art" -- On fiction in fact -- F. Scott Fitzgerald revisited -- Raymond Chandler: genre and "art" -- Renâe Magritte: art contra art -- After the road: the art of Jack Kerouac -- Haunted Sylvia Plath -- The enigmatic art of Paul Bowles -- Jean Stafford: biography as pathography -- To bedlam: Anne Sexton -- Bellow's portraits -- John Updike's Rabbit -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Colored people -- John Edgar Wideman: memoir and fiction -- Exile and homeland: Brian Moore -- Updike Toward the end of time -- Inside the locked room: P.D. James -- A dream of justice: Dorothy L. Sayers -- Lost in boxing -- The miniaturist art of Grace Paley -- American views: Elizabeth Hardwick -- Three American gothics: Jeffrey Dahmer, November 1994 ; Timothy James McVeigh, May 1995 -- Mike Tyson, July 1997 -- "I had no other thrill or happiness": the literature of serial killers -- "Then all collapsed": tragic Melville -- The essential Emily Dickinson -- "The madness of art": Henry James's "The middle years" -- The riddle of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin market" -- Rediscovering Harold Frederic's The damnation of Theron Ware -- Tragic Conrad: Heart of darkness and The secret sharer -- Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman: a celebration -- Killer kids -- Workings of grace: Flannery O'Connor's "The artificial nigger" -- Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942: painting and poem -- The artist looks at nature: some works of Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) -- Where are you going, where have you been? Selected early short stories: afterword -- Expensive people: the confessions of a "minor character" -- Wonderland revisited -- "American, abroad" -- "Why don't you come live with me it's time" -- Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang -- "You petted me, and I followed you home" -- "Mark of Satan" -- Will you always love me? -- "Ghost girls."