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 / Bussell Banks -- Bess / Jayne Anne Phillips -- Among the paths to Eden / Truman Capote -- I look out for Ed Wlfe / 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 -- About the authors.