From the Book - First edition.
Introduction: Where writers learn their best moves
X-raying Gatsby : power of the parts
X-raying Lolita : words at play
X-raying Hemingway and Didion : words left out
X-raying James Joyce : language as sacrament
X-raying Sylvia Plath : jolt of insight
X-raying Flannery O'Connor : dragon's teeth
X-raying "The lottery" : piling stones
X-raying Madame Bovary : signs of inner life
X-raying Miss Lonelyhearts and A visit from the Goon Squad : texts within texts
X-raying King Lear and The grapes of wrath : tests of character
X-raying Gabriel García Márquez : making it strange
X-raying Homer, Virgil, Roth- and Hitchcock : zooming in
X-raying Chaucer : pointing the way
X-raying Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : careless wish
X-raying Macbeth : ends of things
X-raying Shakespeare's sonnets : shaking the form
X-raying Moby-Dick : three little words
X-raying W.B. Yeats : sacred center
X-raying Zora Neale Hurston : words on fire
X-raying Harper Lee : weight of the wait
X-raying M.F.K. Fisher : cooking a story
X-raying Hiroshima : stopped clock
X-raying Rachel Carson and Laura Hillenbrand : sea inside us
X-raying Toni Morrison : repetitious variation
X-raying Charles Dickens and Donna Tartt : echo of text
Great sentences from famous authors : an exercise in X-ray reading
Twelve steps to get started as an X-ray reader.
