From the Book - First edition.
I. Writing life. Is the uninspired life worth living? ; This I believe : five motives for writing ; Anatomy of a story ; Writing room --
II. Classics. My life in Middlemarch : Rebecca Mead ; Charles Dickens : a life : Claire Tomalin ; "The King of Weird" : H.P. Lovecraft ; My faraway one : selected letters of Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz ; Simenons ; Two American prose masters : Ellison, Updike ; A visit with Doris Lessing (1973) --
III. Contemporaries. Childhood of Jesus : J.M. Coetzee ; Detective as visionary : Derek Raymond ; "Catastrophe in art" : Julian Barnes ; "When the legend becomes fact" : Larry McMurtry ; Paper losses : Lorrie Moore ; Emotions of man and animals : Karen Joy Fowler ; Wiindigoo justice : Louise Erdrich ; In other worlds : Margaret Atwood ; Storyteller of the "shattered personality" : Patrick McGrath ; Why be happy when you could be normal? : Jeanette Winterson ; Diminished things : Anne Tyler ; Smiling woman : Margaret Drabble ; Inventions of Jerome Charyn ; "After Auschwitz" : Martin Amis ; London NW : Zadie Smith ; Joan Didion : risk and triumph ; Unflinching about women : the short stories of Lucia Berlin ; Edna O'Brien : The little red chairs ; "Disputed truth" : Mike Tyson ; Fighter : a film by David O. Russell ; Mystery of Muhammad Ali --
IV. Real life. A visit to San Quentin (2011).