Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Visual

Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Discovery of India

Robert Capa

If I Die in a Combat Zone

Ruth Orkin’s V-E Day

Richard Avedon

Enrique Metinides

Joel Sternfeld’s Utopian Visions

Alec Soth: Riverrun

Richard Misrach

William Gedney

Michael Ackerman

Miroslav Tichý

Saving Grace: Todd Hido

Idris Khan

Edward Burtynsky

Turner and Memory

The American Sublime

The Awakening of Stones: Rodin

Ecce Homo

Verbals

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night

Pounding Print

Richard Ford: Independence Day

James Salter: The Hunters and Light Years

Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke

Ian McEwan: Atonement

Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

Don DeLillo: Point Omega

The Goncourt Journals

Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

John Cheever: The Journals

Ryszard Kapuściński’s African Life

W. G. Sebald, Bombing, and Thomas Bernhard

Regarding the Achievement of Others: Susan Sontag

The Moral Art of War

Musicals

“My Favorite Things”

Ramamani

Def Leppard and the Anthropology of Supermodernity

Editions of Contemporary Me

Is Jazz Dead?

Cherry Street

Variables

Blues for Vincent

Loving and Admiring: Camus’s Algeria

Oradour-sur-Glane

Parting Shots

The Wrong Stuff

Fabulous Clothes

The 2004 Olympics

Sex and Hotels

What Will Survive of Us

Personals

The Airfix Generation

Comics in a Man’s Life

Violets of Pride

On Being an Only Child

Sacked

On the Roof

Unpacking My Library

Reader’s Block

My Life as a Gate-Crasher

Something Didn’t Happen

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
(with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts)

Of Course

Sources and Acknowledgments