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