More alive and less lonely: on books and writers

I. Engulf and devour

The loneliest book I've read

Footnote on Sylvie Selig

Engulf and devour

The figure in the castle

The greatest animal novelist of all time

The counter-Roth

II. It can still take me there

The only human superhero

Forget this introduction

What's old is new (NYRB)

To catch a beat

Footnote

III. Objects in furious motion

Fierce attachments

Attention drifting beautifully (Donald Barthelme)

Rock of ages

My hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard

A new life (Malamud)

A mug's game

Steven Millhauser's ghost stories

IV. Lost worlds

The mechanics of fear, revisited

On the Yard

Walter Tevis's Mockingbird

Everything said and exhausted (Daniel Fuchs)

How did I get here and what could it possibly mean? (Bernard Wolfe)

'Twas ever thus (Tanguy Viel's Beyond Suspicion)

Russell Greenan's Geniuses

V. Ecstatic depictions of consciousness

Consumed

Dog soldiers

Bizarro world

On two sentences from Charles D'Ambrosio's "Screenwriter"

Remarks perhaps of some assistance to the reader of Joseph McElroy's Ancient history: a paraphase

VI. Thomas Berger and I have never met (Ishiguro, Berger and PKD)

Kazuo Ishiguro

The butler did it

Footnote on Ishiguro

High priest of the paranoids

The man whose teeth were all exactly alike

To Ubik

Life after wartime

Thomas Berger

Letters from the invisible man: my correspondence with Thomas Berger

Footnote on Berger

VII. OK you mugs

Heavy petting

More than night

You talkin' to me?

New York characters

Lost and found

The original piece of wood I left in your head: a conversation between director Spike Jonze and critic Perkus Tooth

Johnny's graying teenaged sense of what isn't boring (Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002)

Close reading (Ricks on Dylan)

Rod Serling

Mutual seduction

VIII. Fan mail

Carved in need

New old friend (a toast to Kenneth Koch)

Eyes wide open

Something about a slice

Pynchonopolis

To Cosmicomics

Anthony Burgess answers two questions

A furtive exchange

Books are sandwiches.