There is simply too much to think about: collected nonfiction

Prologue: Starting out in Chicago. The Fifties and before. Spanish letter

Illinois journey

The University as villain

The sharp edge of life

Laughter in the ghetto: on Sholom Aleichem

Dreiser and the triumph of art

Hemingway and the image of man

Man underground: on Ralph Ellison

The 1,001 afternoons of Ben Hecht

The swamp of prosperity: on Philip Roth

The writer and the audience

Distractions of a fiction writer

Deep readers of the world, beware!

A talk with the yellow kid

The Sixties. The sealed treasure

On Jewish storytelling

Up from the pushcart: on Abraham Cahan

Where do we go from here? The future of fiction

At the movies

On Shakespeare's sonnets

The writer as moralist

Beatrice Webb's America

Recent fiction: a tour of inspection

Barefoot boy: on Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My man Bummidge

The thinking man's waste land

Cloister culture

Israel: the six-day war

Skepticism and the depth of life

The Seventies. On America: remarks at the U.S. Cultural Center in Tel Aviv

New York: world-famous impossibility

Machines and storybooks. Literature in the age of technology

A world too much with us

An interview with myself

The Nobel lecture

American who are also Jews: upon receiving the Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League

The day they signed the treat

The Eighties. In the days of Mr. Roosevelt

Reflections on Alexis doe Tocqueville: a seminar at the University of Chicago

My Paris

Foreword to 'The revolt of the Masses' by José Ortega y Gasset

The civilized barbarian reader

A Jewish writer in America: a lecture

Chicago: the city that was, the city that is

The Nineties and after. There is simply too much to think about

Writers, intellectuals, politics: mainly reminiscence

Papuans and Zulus

Alone in mixed company

Ralph Ellison in Tivoli

Literature: the next chapter

Wit irony fun games

Vermont: the good place

Winter in Tuscany

Before I go away: a words and images interview with Norman Manea

"I got a scheme!": with Philip Roth

Coda: Why not?