The following essays appeared in earlier forms in other publications:
“American Originality” (The Threepenny Review, Fall 2001)
“American Narcissism” (The Threepenny Review, Winter 1998)
“Ersatz Thought” (The Threepenny Review, Winter 1999)
“On Buddenbrooks” (The Threepenny Review, Summer 2003)
“Story Tellers” (American Poetry Review, July/August 1997, vol. 26, issue 4)
“On Realism” (The Threepenny Review, Summer 2004)
“The Culture of Healing” (presented at a symposium at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy)
“On Revenge” (The Threepenny Review, Fall 2013)
“Estrangement” (The Threepenny Review, Summer 2016)
“Fear of Happiness” (Hopwood Lecture, University of Michigan, 1996; Michigan Quarterly Review, 1996)
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Yale University Press for permission to reprint selections from the following books:
The Cuckoo, Peter Streckfus (2004)
Crush, Richard Siken (2005)
Green Squall, Jay Hopler (2006)
Frail Craft, Jessica Fisher (2007)
The Earth in the Attic, Fady Joudah (2008)
It is Daylight, Arda Collins (2009)
Juvenalia, Ken Chen (2010)
Radial Symmetry, Katherine Larson (2011)
Excerpts from The Clerk’s Tale: Poems by Spencer Reece. Copyright © 2004 by Spencer Reece. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from In the Surgical Theater by Dana Levin. Copyright © 1999 by Dana Levin. Reprinted by permission of American Poetry Review. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon” from Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon: Poems by Dan Chiasson, copyright © 2010 by Dan Chiasson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from “Bicentennial” from Bicentennial: Poems by Dan Chiasson, copyright © 2014 by Dan Chiasson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts “From the Childhood of Jesus” from The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky. Copyright © 1991 by Robert Pinsky. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.