Fiction: Simple murders / Margaret Atwood -- Last days / Paul Auster -- Canadians / Russell Banks -- The infamous fall of Howell the Clown / Ann Beattie -- Afternoon with Antaeus / Paul Bowles -- I would love you like a jacaranda / Sandra Cisneros -- Videotape / Don DeLillo -- Middlewest / Richard Ford -- Pavel Hudak, the poet, is talking / Gary Gildner -- Visiting Oupa / Nadine Gordimer -- Longing / Shirley Hazzard -- Trophy / William Hoffman -- Macedonia: days of 1944 / Edmund Keeley -- Blind Willie / Stephen King -- Oft in the stilly night / Coleen McCullough -- The people next door / Mary Morris -- Parrots, Ltd. / R.K Narayan -- Mark of Satan / Joyce Carol Oates -- A case for political inspectors / Josef Skvorecky -- The life of the body / Jane Smiley -- The potato dealer / William Trevor -- Two boys and a girl / Tobias Wolff. Poetry. Dangerous moonlight / John Ashberry -- A coin for Joe, with the image of a horse; c. 350-325 BC / Frank Bidart -- Evangelical / Lucie Brock-Broido -- Anti-Shenandoah: two skits and a chorus of Going east / Joseph Brodsky -- Between the earthquake, the volcano and the leopard / Charles Bukowski -- The ships / C.P. Cavafy -- Rune for the parable of despair / Deborah Digges -- Pastoral / Annie Dillard -- Painful fingers / Stephen Dobyns -- The living / Stephen Dunn -- Apocalypse of Les Halles / Allen Ginsberg -- Symposium / Louise Gluck -- Flood / Jorie Graham -- Sonoran radio / Jim Harrison -- Dragonflies mating / Robert Hass -- Damson / Seamus Heaney -- The unbeginning / Brenda Hillman -- Days of 1968 / Edward Hirsch -- Imitations of immortality / Michael Hofmann -- Homage to Antonio Canaletto / Richard Howard -- The locket / Ted Hughes -- The music of poetry / Galway Kinnell -- Reunion / Carolyn Kizer -- Children who fall off the edge of the world / Cynthia MacDonald -- Cancer talk / William Matthews -- Elegy for three / Robert Mazzocco -- The first trimester / Campbell McGrath -- Scrapping the computer / James Merrill -- Posessions / W.S. Merwin -- This world / Czeslaw Milosz -- Music / Susan Mitchell -- Sunday night / Sharon Olds -- Night fever / Michael Ondaatje -- Poem with refrains / Robert Pinsky -- Panegyric for Gee / Stanley Plumly -- The figure You / David St. John -- Expulsion / Grace Shulman -- Relaxing in a madhouse / Charles Simic -- Daconstruction / Gary Snyder -- A missed opportunity / James Tate -- Recorded birds / Chase Twitchell -- From the house on Nguyen Du / Bruce Weigl -- Secrets / C.K. Williams -- Omaggio a Montale / Charles Wright. Documents. There once was a lady who did ... / Roy Blount Jr. -- The birds of Paolo Uccello / Italo Calvino -- Notebook / President Bill Clinton -- Ten poems / Hart Crane -- Life with daughters: an essay on proportionality / Gerald Early -- Finding a form / William H. Gass -- Serious life: a locket / Edward Gorey -- The unpublished opening of The sun also rises / Ernest Hemingway -- Letter to Ernest Hemingway on The sun also rises / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A reviewer's beginnings / Helen Vendler -- An open letter / Paul Bowles -- Airborne Antaeus / Ed Koren.