A volume of nonfiction writings and essays by the National Book Critics Circle finalist draws on twenty-five years of work and includes pieces that reflect on subjects ranging from jazz and the British-dole queue to haute couture and hotel sex.

Visuals. 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 Kahn ; 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 the 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 Japuscinski'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' 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 Doughtnut Plant doughnuts) ; Of course.