The story about the story : great writers explore great literature / edited by J.C. Hallman.

Introduction : toward a fusion / J.C. Hallman -- Salinger and sobs / Charles D'Ambrosio -- An essay in criticism / Virginia Woolf -- On a stanza by John Keats / Sven Birkerts -- In terms of the toenail : fiction and the figures of life / William H. Gass -- The border trilogy by Cormac McCarthy / Dagoberto Gilb -- "The metamorphosis" / Vladimir Nabokov -- "How to express your emotions" : an excerpt from How Proust can change your life / Alain de Botton -- Learning from Eliot / Seamus Heaney -- Out of Kansas / Salman Rushdie -- Portentous evil / J.C. Hallman -- The other James / Michael Chabon -- Truman Capote reconsidered / Cynthia Ozick -- What Chekhov meant by life / James Wood -- Herman Melville's Moby Dick / D.H. Lawrence -- An excerpt from Out of sheer rage / Geoff Dyer -- Robert Frost / Czeslaw Milosz -- An excerpt from The year of reading Proust / Phyllis Rose -- The humble animal / Randall Jarrell -- Loving Dostoyevsky / Susan Sontag -- An excerpt from How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry / Edward Hirsch -- A slight sound at evening / E.B. White -- Good-bye, Holden Caulfield. I mean it. Go! Good-bye! / Walter Kirn -- Mr. Pater's last volume / Oscar Wilde -- Into some wild places with Hemingway / Fred Setterberg -- Lowell's graveyard / Robert Hass -- Thoughts on The idiot by Dostoevsky / Herman Hesse -- An author in search of a subject / Frank O'Connor -- Waugh's comic wasteland / David Lodge -- Somewhere behind / Milan Kundera -- Herman Melville / Albert Camus -- On Steinbeck's story "Flight" / Wallace Stegner.