Shaughnessy, Brenda
Shaw, Nate
Shawn, William
Shedd, William G. T.
Sheed, Wilfrid
Sheen, Martin
Shepard, Sam
Sherrill, Billy
Shore, Emily
Shteyngart, Gary
Sickert, Walter
Sigal, Clancy
Silliman, Ron
Simic, Charles
Skinner, Reverend John
Sledge, E. B.
Smith, Ali
Smith, Danez
Smith, Maggie
Smith, Patricia
Smith, Patti
Smith, Red
Smith, Tracy K.
Smith, Zadie
Snyder, Gary
Solnit, Rebecca
Sontag, Susan
Southern, Terry
Spark, Muriel
Spicer, Jack
Spiegelman, Art
Spiotta, Dana
Springsteen, Bruce
Spufford, Francis
St. Aubyn, Edward
Stein, Gertrude
Steinem, Gloria
Stenger, Victor
Sterne, Laurence
Stevens, Wallace
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stone, I. F.
Stone, Robert
Stoppard, Tom
Stourton, James
Straub, Emma
Stritch, Elaine
Styron, William
Sullivan, Hannah
Sullivan, John Jeremiah
Swift, Jonathan
Symons, Arthur
Tablada, José Juan
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas
Taylor, Charles
Tempest, Kate
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
Theroux, Paul
This Is Spinal Tap
Thomas, Dylan
Thompson, Hunter S.
Thoreau, Henry David
Tilberis, Liz
Tillman, Lynne
Tóibín, Colm
Toklas, Alice B.
Tolson, Melvin B.
Tolstoy, Leo
Toole, John Kennedy
Tosches, Nick
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de
Travolta, John
Trefusis, Violet
Trevor, William
Trevor-Roper, Hugh
Trillin, Calvin
Trilling, Lionel
Trollope, Anthony
Trotsky, Leon
Truffaut, François
Truth, Sojourner
Twain, Mark
Twombly, Cy
Tynan, Kenneth
Updike, John
Ustinov, Peter
Vargas Llosa, Mario
Verlaine, Paul
Vidal, Gore
Voltaire
von Arnim, Elizabeth
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.
Vorse, Mary Heaton
Vuong, Ocean
Wadsworth, Jerry
Wainwright, Loudon, III
Waiter
Waits, Tom
Wallace, David Foster
Walls, Jeannette
Ward, Jesmyn
Warhol, Andy
Warren, Robert Penn
Washington, Bryan
Washington, George
Wasserman, Lew
Waters, Alice
Waters, John
Waters, Sarah
Waugh, Auberon
Waugh, Evelyn
Weil, Simone
Welch, Gillian
Welsh, Irvine
Welty, Eudora
Wenner, Jann
West, Dame Rebecca
West, Mae
West, Nathanael
Whitaker, Rogers E. M.
White, Bukka
White, Dwight
White, E. B.
White, Edmund
Whitehead, Colson
Whitehorn, Katharine
Whitman, Walt
Whittemore, Reed
Wiener, Anna
Wiggum, Ralph
Wilbur, Richard
Wilde, Oscar
Williams, Diane
Williams, Joy
Williams, Miller
Williams, Tennessee
Williams, William Carlos
Wills, Garry
Wilmers, Mary-Kay
Wilson, Edmund
Winterson, Jeanette
Wintour, Anna
Wire
Woddis, Roger
Wodehouse, P. G.
Wojnarowicz, David
Wolcott, James
Wolfe, George C.
Wolfe, Tom
Wolitzer, Meg
Woodrell, Daniel
Woolf, Virginia
Woollcott, Alexander
Wordsworth, William
Wouk, Herman
Wrangham, Richard
Wright, Charles (novelist)
Wright, Charles (poet)
Wright, Franz
Wurtzel, Elizabeth
Yoakam, Dwight
York, Peter
Young, Kevin
Young, Stark
Youngman, Henny
Zappa, Frank
Zelazny, Roger
Zink, Nell
Zola, Émile
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Lines from “Haiku” by José Juan Tablada, in Anthology of Mexican Poetry by Octavio Paz, translated by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1965 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
Lines from “Nikki-Rosa” by Nikki Giovanni, in The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Compilation copyright © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Lines from “No-Fly Zone” by Tracy K. Smith, from Life on Mars. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Lines from “September 1, 1939” by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1940 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Lines from “Steps” by Frank O’Hara, from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.
Lines from “On the Circuit,” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The Rita Dove quote is excerpted from her poem “Gospel,” in Thomas and Beulah, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh 1986. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.
Lines from “PSI,” in Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B Tolson, Tolson, Melvin B., Jr. Edited by Raymond Nelson. Introduction by Rita Dove. © 1999 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the University of Virginia Press.
Lines from “Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine,” from The Essential Etheridge Knight by Etheridge Knight, © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Lines from “A Life” by Howard Nemerov. Courtesy, the Literary Estate of Howard Nemerov.
ALSO BY DWIGHT GARNER
Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dwight Garner is a book critic for The New York Times and was previously the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review. His essays and criticism have also appeared in The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, Slate, and other publications. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Preface
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
Permissions Acknowledgments
Also by Dwight Garner
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2020 by Dwight Garner
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found at the end of the book.
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