The Norton book of personal essays

Personal essay : a form of discovery / Joseph Epstein

Italian without a master / Mark Twain

Something defeasible / Max Beerbohm

Joseph Conrad / Bertrand Russell

Chance meeting / Willa Cather

Dream / Winston Churchill

Reflections on journalism / H.L. Mencken

Leslie Stephen / Virginia Woolf

Visit to a godmother / Rebecca West

St. Augustine and the bullfight / Katherine Anne Porter

Middle or blue periond / Dorothy Parker

Preface to Persius / Edmund Wilson

Sleeping and waking / F. Scott Fitzgerald

What are you doing in my dreams? / Dawn Powell

Once more to the lake / E.B. White

How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston

In quest of beer / Frank O'Connor

Revisiting Greece / Cyril Connolly

Moon under water / George Orwell

Good appetite / A.J. Liebling

Chic- English, French, and American / Nancy Mitford

Lost childhood / Graham Greene

Stranger / Emily Hahn

Angry winter / Loren Eiseley

Flaw / M.F.K. Fisher

Little store / Eudora Welty.

Author's mail / Barbara Tuchman

Notes on punctuation / Lewis Thomas

Living with music / Ralph Ellison

My father / Doris Lessing

Jury duty / William Zinsser

Tangier / Truman Capote

Stranger in the village / James Baldwin

How to eat an ice-cream cone / L. Rust Hills

King of the birds / Flannery O'Connor

Lesson of the master / Cynthia Ozick

Cops and writers / Jean Hollander

Vanishing act / Dan Jacobson

Take the "A" train / Jeremy Bernstein

Quintana / John Gregory Dunne

In the middle of the journey / V.S. Naipaul

Bull on the mountain / Oliver Sacks

On keeping a notebook / Joan Didion

I like a Gershwin tune / Joseph Epstein

Bey / Bruce Chatwin

Tools of torture / Phyllis Rose

Ron her son / Nancy Mairs

Going home again / Richard Rodriguez

Living like weasels / Annie Dillard

Inheritance of tools / Scott Russell Sanders

Grown men / Barry Lopez

Oyez à Beaumont / Vicki Hearne

On being black and middle class / Shelby Steele

Mother tongue / Amy Tan.