I. Forerunners. On noise ; Asthma ; Scipio's villa ; Slaves / Seneca ; Consolation to his wife / Plutarch ; Hateful things / Sei Shonagon ; Essays in idleness (selections) / Kenko ; Pleasure boat studio / Ou-Yang Hsiu --

II. Fountainhead. Of books ; Of a monstrous child ; Of some verses on Virgil / Michel de Montaigne --

III. The rise of the English essay. Of greatness / Abraham Cowley ; Nicolini and the lions ; An hour or two sacred to sorrow ; Twenty-four hours in London ; Love-letters / Addison & Steele ; The boarding house ; The solitude of the country / Samuel Johnson ; An essay on the noble science of self-justification / Maria Edgeworth ; New Year's Eve ; A chapter on ears ; Dream children : a reverie ; The superannuated man / Charles Lamb ; On going a journey ; On the pleasure of hating ; The fight / William Hazlitt ; The lantern-bearers ; An apology for idlers ; On marriage / Robert Louis Stevenson ; Going out for a walk ; Laughter / Max Beerbohm ; A piece of chalk ; On running after one's hat / G.K. Chesterton ; Street haunting ; The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf ; Such, such were the joys / George Orwell --

IV. Other cultures, other continents. The execution of Tropmann / Ivan Turgenev ; This too is life ; Death / Lu Hsun ; In praise of shadows / Junichiro Tanizaki ; Unpacking my library ; Hashish in Marseilles / Walter Benjamin ; Blindness / Jorge Luis Borges ; Beside the Nore ; Aunt Harriet / Hubert Butler ; Some blind alleys : a letter / E.M. Cioran ; Leaving the movie theater / Roland Barthes ; He and I / Natalia Ginzburg ; How I started to write / Carlos Fuentes ; Why do I fast? / Wole Soyinka ; Meatless days / Sara Suleri --

V. The American scene. Walking / Henry David Thoreau ; On being an American / H.L. Mencken ; My face / Robert Benchley ; The secret life of James Thurber / James Thurber ; The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Once more to the lake ; The ring of time / E.B. White ; Once a tramp, always / M.F.K. Fisher ; My confession / Mary McCarthy ; For my brothers and sisters in the failure business / Seymour Krim ; Notes of a native son ; Alas, poor Richard / James Baldwin ; Some memories of the glorious bird and an earlier self / Gore Vidal ; Split at the root / Adrienne Rich ; The courage of turtles ; The threshold and the jolt of pain / Edward Hoagland ; An entrance to the woods / Wendell Berry ; Goodbye to all that ; In bed / Joan Didion ; Seeing / Annie Dillard ; The knife / Richard Selzer ; Against joie de vivre / Phillip Lopate ; Under the influence / Scott Russell Sanders ; Do he have your number, Mr. Jeffrey? / Gayle Pemberton ; Late Victorians / Richard Rodriguez.