Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Acknowledgments vi
3. Contents vii
4. Author’s Note xi
5. 1. Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story 1
6. 2. H. C. Witwer and Me: The Making of a Reader 17
7. 3. Stop the Presses: A Petition for Less Writing 29
8. 4. What Do You Know? What Don’t You Know? 39
9. 5. Death, It’s What Ails You 55
10. 6. Why Smart People Believe in God 69
11. 7. Taste, Too, Is an Art 85
12. 8. The Rule of Temperament 97
13. 9. Art and Craft 107
14. 10. Certitudes 117
15. 11. What Happened? The Rise and Fall of Theory 127
16. 12. How We Write When We Write About Writing 137
17. 13. Looking for a Good Argument: Argument and the Novel 149
18. 14. Just Imagine: Three Hundred Years of the Creative Imagination 157
19. 15. Going, Going, Gone: The Place of Poetry in American Letters 167
20. 16. The Writing Life 181
21. Credits 191