"Not a nice person" -- Uncensored Sylvia Plath -- "Restoring" Willie Stark -- Catherizing Willa -- Merciless Highsmith -- "Glutton for punishment": Richard Yates -- "Not a nice person": Muriel Spark -- Our contemporaries, ourselves -- Irish elegy: William Trevor -- "Our cheapened dreams" : E.L. Doctorow -- "Despair of living": Anita Brookner -- An artist of the floating world: Kazuo Ishiguro -- "City of light": Robert Drewe's The Shark Net -- L.A. noir: Michael Connelly -- Ringworm belt: memoirs by Mary Karr -- Evolutionary fever: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map -- "New memoir": Alice Sebold's Lucky -- Property of: Valerie Martin's Property -- Programmed by art: David Lodge's Thinks ... -- Ghosts: Hilary Mantel -- An endangered species: short stories -- News from everywhere: short stories -- Mythmaking realist: Pat Barker -- Crazy for love: Scott Spencer's A Ship Made of Paper -- Amateurs: Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage -- Memoirs of crisis: Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty -- Homages -- Emily Bronẗë's Wuthering Heights -- "Tragic mulatta": Clotel, or, the President's Daughter -- Ernest Hemingway -- "You are the we of me": Carson McCullers -- Remembering Robert Lowell -- "About whom nothing is known": Balthus -- In the ring and out: Jack Johnson -- Muhammad Ali: "The Greatest" -- (Re) visits -- The vampire's secret: (re)viewing Tod Browning's Dracula after forty years -- Don DeLillo's Americana (1971) revisited -- Them revisited -- A Garden of Earthly Delights revisited -- On the composition of I Lock my Door Upon Myself -- Private writings, public betrayals -- Pilgrimage to Walden Pond: 1962, 2003.