Becoming a man of letters: Ultra manifesto ; On expressionism ; After images ; Joyce's Ulysses ; Ballad of reading Gaol -- Word music: Verbiage for poems ; An investigation of the word ; Art of verbal abuse ; On literary description ; On metaphor ; Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass -- On translation: Two ways to translate ; Homeric versions -- Reading as writing: A profession of literary faith ; Literary pleasure ; Superstitious ethics of the reader ; Paradox of Apollinaire ; Kafka and his precursors ; Flaubert and his exemplary destiny -- Critic at work: Virginia Woolf ; T. S. Eliot ; Paul Valery ; William Faulkner, Absalom! absalom! ; Herman Mellville, Bartleby the scrivener ; Henry James, The abasement of the Northmores ; Marcel Schwob, imaginary lives ; H. G. Wells, The time machine ; The invisible man ; Julio Cortazar, stories -- Perfect plot: Labyrinths of the detective story and Chesterton ; Ellery Queen, The halfway house ; Adolfo Bioy Casares, The invention of morel ; Wilkie Collins, The moonstone ; Detective story -- Narrative art: Stories from Turkestan ; Cinematograph, the biograph ; Narrative art and magic ; Preface to a universal history of infamy ; When fiction lives in fiction.