“A Poet’s Prose” was written as an introduction to Marina Tsvetaeva, Captive Spirit: Selected Prose (Virago Press, 1983).
“Where the Stress Falls” appeared in The New Yorker, June 18, 2001.
“Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis” is the foreword to a reprinting of Epitaph of a Small Winner (Noonday Press, 1990).
“A Mind in Mourning” appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000.
“The Wisdom Project” appeared in The New Republic, March 16, 2001.
“Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes” is the introduction to A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (Hill and Wang, 1982).
“Walser’s Voice” is the preface to Robert Walser, Selected Stories, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).
“Danilo Kiš” is the introduction to Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
“Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke” is the foreword to a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (Yale University Press, 2000).
“Pedro Páramo” is the foreword to a new translation of Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (Grove Press, 1994).
“DQ” was published in Spanish translation in a National Tourist Board of Spain catalogue, “España: Todo bajo el sol,” in 1985; it has never before appeared in English.
“A Letter to Borges,” written on the tenth anniversary of Borges’s death and published in Spanish translation in the Buenos Aires daily Clarin, June 13, 1996, has never before appeared in English.
“A Century of Cinema” was written for and first published in German translation in Frankfurter Rundschau, December 30, 1995.
“Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz” appeared in Vanity Fair, September 1983.
“A Note on Bunraku” was a program note for performances of the Bunraku Puppet Theatre at the Japan Society in New York City on March 12—19, 1983.
“A Place for Fantasy” appeared in House and Garden, February 1983.
“The Pleasure of the Image” appeared in Art in America, November 1987.
“About Hodgkin” was written for Howard Hodgkin Paintings, the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 1995, and subsequently seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was first published in Britain by Thames & Hudson in 1995.
“A Lexicon for Available Light” appeared in Art in America, December 1983.
“In Memory of Their Feelings” was written for the catalogue Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, which accompanied an exhibit at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London from October 31 to December 2, 1989.
“Dancer and the Dance” first appeared in French Vogue, December 1986, in French translation and in English.
“On Lincoln Kirstein” is a revision, done in 1997 for a publication by the New York City Ballet, of a tribute to Lincoln Kirstein written ten years earlier, on his eightieth birthday, which appeared in Vanity Fair, May 1987.
“Wagner’s Fluids” was the program essay for a production of Tristan und Isolde staged by Jonathan Miller at the Los Angeles Opera in December 1987.
“An Ecstasy of Lament” was the program essay for a production of Pelléas et Mélisande staged by Robert Wilson at the Salzburg Festival in July 1997.
“One Hundred Years of Italian Photography” is the foreword to Italy: One Hundred Years of Photography (Alinari 1988).
“On Bellocq” is the introduction to a new edition of E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits (Jonathan Cape and Random House, 1996).
“Borland’s Babies” is the preface to Polly Borland’s The Babies (power-House Books, 2001).
“Certain Mapplethorpes” is the preface to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Certain People: A Book of Portraits (Twelvetrees Press, 1985).
“A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” was written as an accompanying text to Annie Leibovitz’s Women (Random House, 1999).
“Homage to Halliburton” was published in Oxford American, March/April 2001.
“Singleness,” one of a group of essays inspired by Borges’s “Borges y yo,” was collected in Who’s Writing This?, ed. Daniel Halpern (Ecco Press, 1995).
“Writing As Reading,” a contribution to a series called “Writers on Writing” in The New York Times, appeared on December 18, 2000.
“Thirty Years Later …” is the preface to a new edition of the Spanish translation of Against Interpretation (Alfaguara, 1996). It was first published in English in Threepenny Review (Summer 1996).
“Questions of Travel” appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, June 22, 1984.
“The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)” started as a talk delivered at a conference on Europe held in Berlin in late May 1988. It has never before appeared in English.
“The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)” was written for the catalogue of an art exhibition in Berlin and first published there, in German translation, in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit Berlin 1990, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, Joachim Sartorius, and Christoph Tannert (Edition Hentrich, 1990). It appeared in English in The New Yorker, March 4, 1991.
“Answers to a Questionnaire” was written in July 1997, in response to a questionnaire sent by a French literary quarterly. It was published, in French, in “Enquête: Que peuvent les intellectuels? 36 écrivains répondent,” La Règle du Jeu, n.s. 21 (1998), and has never before appeared in English.
“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo” was first published in The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993.
“‘There’ and ‘Here’” appeared in The Nation, December 25, 1995.
“Joseph Brodsky” was written in 1997 as the afterword to Mikhail Lemkhin, Joseph BrodskylLeningrad Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
“On Being Translated,” a speech given in November 1995 at a conference on translation held at Columbia University and organized by Francesco Pellizzi, the editor of Res, was printed in Res 32 (Autumn 1997).