1. Writing It Down for James: Some Thoughts on Reading Toward the Millennium

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction: Getting Started; or, Two Thousand Books 1
5. Part 1. Reading
6. 1. Writing It Down for James: Some Thoughts on Reading Toward the Millennium 15
7. 2. Books in Flames: A View of Latin American Literature 33
8. 3. The Lost Books 46
9. 4. Hamlet in Haiti: Style in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World 55
10. 5. Traces of Light: The Paradoxes of Narrative Painting and Pictorial Fiction 77
11. 6. Truth as Fiction: Or, the Tail of the Monstrous Peacock 94
12. 7. The Consolation of Art 107
13. Part 2. Rereading
14. 8. You Can Read Wolfe Again 134119
15. 9. Stories of Deep Delight 134
16. 10. Of Steinbeck and Salinas 150
17. 11. The Return of James Agee 159
18. 12. Mario Vargas Llosa and Conversation in the Cathedral: The Question of Naturalism 176
19. 13. Where Is She Going? Where Has She Been?: Elizabeth Tallent’s “No One’s a Mystery’’ and the Poetry of Female Initiation 184
20. 14. A Wintry Saga 192
21. 15. Bernard and Juliet: Romance and Desire in Malamud’s High Art 198
22. 16. Fitzgerald’s Christmas Carol, or the Burden of “The Camel’s Back’’ 207
23. 17. A Note on Landscape in All the Pretty Horses 215
24. 18. Rereading Traven 220
25. Part 3. Writing
26. 19. Confessions of an Ex-Minimalist 227
27. 20. On the Contemporary 243
28. 21. Of the Making of Books 254
29. 22. Voices: A Conversation 272