A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar EssaysW. W. Norton & Company, 1992 - 332 pages "[His] way with the familiar essay--that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity--has much in common with that of Messrs, Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro." --Wall Street Journal |
Contents
A Note on the Title | 11 |
The Gentle Art of the Resounding PutDown | 32 |
The Bore Wars | 50 |
Autodidact | 69 |
Quotatious | 88 |
Confessions of a Low Roller | 108 |
Calm and Uncollected | 127 |
Short Subject | 146 |
And Thats What I Like About the South | 187 |
The Man in the Green | 218 |
A Few Kind Words for Envy | 238 |
Waiter Theres a Paragraph in My Soup | 257 |
Entre Nous | 277 |
Money Is Funny | 296 |
Dancing in the Darts | 314 |
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes | 166 |
Common terms and phrases
A. J. Liebling able Arkansas artists asked baseball become Beerbohm believe bores called Chicago cigar cigarette collection course delight Dorothy Parker Edmund Wilson envy essay Evelyn Waugh fame famous father feel felt gambler gambling gin rummy gossip H. L. Mencken hats Henry James high school intellectual interest kind knew known least Little Rock live look lunch MacArthur Fellowship magazine Max Beerbohm mind never nice notebooks novel once one's perhaps photograph played put-down quotation quote recall recently remarked restaurant Samuel Johnson Saul Bellow seemed sense serious short smoking someone story T. S. Eliot talk tall teacher television tell tend things thought tion told turn W. H. Auden walk wearing wife wish woman women words writing wrote York young