Soul at the white heat: inspiration, obsession, and the writing life

I. The writing life. Is the uninspired life worth living? ; This I believe : five motives for writing ; Anatomy of a story ; The writing room

II. Classics. My life in Middlemarch : Rebecca Mead ; Charles Dickens : a life : Claire Tomalin ; "The King of Weird" : H. P. Lovecraft ; My faraway one : selected letters of Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz ; Simenons ; Two American prose masters : Ellison, Updike ; A visit with Doris Lessing (1973)

III. Contemporaries. The childhood of Jesus : J.M. Coetzee ; The detective as visionary : Derek Raymond ; "Catastrophe in art" : Julian Barnes ; "When the legend becomes fact" : Larry McMurtry ; Paper losses : Lorrie Moore ; Emotion of man and animals : Karen Joy Fowler ; Windigoo justice : Louise Erdrich ; In other worlds : Margaret Atwood ; The storyteller of the "shattered personality" : Patrick McGrath ; Why be happy when you could be normal? : Jeanette Winterson ; Diminished things : Anne Tyler ; Smiling woman : Margaret Drabble ; The inventions of Jerome Charyn ; "After Auschwitz" : Martin Amis ; London NW : Zadie Smith ; Joan Didion : risk and triumph ; Unflinching about women : the short stories of Lucia Berlin ; Edna O'Brien : The little red chairs ; "Disputed truth" : Mike Tyson ; The fighter : a film by David O. Russell ; The mystery of Muhammad Ali

IV. Real life. A visit to San Quentin (2011).