Introduction. Retrospection ; Fifty literary pillars ; On reading to oneself ; Even if, by all the oxen in the world ; The doomed in their sinking --
Omensetter's luck. The love and sorrow of Henry Pimber --
In the heart of the heart of the country. The Pederson kid ; Order of insects ; In the heart of the heart of the country --
The tunnel. The first winter of my married life ; An invocation to the muse ; In my youth ; A fugue ; August bees ; The Sunday drive --
Cartesian sonata. Emma enters a sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's --
Middle C. The piano lesson ; Garden ; The Apocalypse Museum --
La vie trèshorrificque : Rabelais revisited --
Robert Walser, an introduction --
Half a man, half a metaphor : the unknown Kafka --
A forest of bamboo : the trouble with Nietzsche --
The high brutality of good intentions --
Henry James's curriculum vitae --
Gertrude Stein and the geography of the sentence --
Go forth and falsify : Katherine Anne Porter and the lies of art --
Three photos of Colette --
Imaginary Borges and his books --
On evil : the ragged core of a sweet apple --
Kinds of killing : the flourishing evil of the Third Reich --
Philosophy and the form of fiction --
The concept of character in fiction --
The baby or the Botticelli --
The book as a container of consciousness --
The architecture of a sentence --
Carrots, noses, snow, roses, roses --
The soul inside the sentence --
The habitations of the word --
