The personals column: The literary miracle -- Slices of life in a library -- Spit in the mitt -- The first fourth following 9/11 -- What freedom of expression means, especially in times like these -- Retrospection -- Old favorites and fresh enemies: A wreath for the grave of Gertrude Stein -- Reading Proust -- Nietzsche: in illness and in health -- Kafka: half a man, half a metaphor -- Unsteady as she goes: Malcolm Lowry's cinema inferno -- The bush of belief -- Henry James's curriculum vitae -- An introduction to John Gardner's Nickel mountain -- Katherine Anne Porter's fictional self -- Knut Hamsun -- Kinds of killing -- The Biggs lectures in the classics: Form: Eidos -- Mimesis -- Metaphor -- Theoretics: Lust -- Narrative sentences -- The aesthetic structure of the sentence.