[Your daily dose of great writing in digestible excerpts. Most recent first.]

• Ha Jin: Human Obliterations
• Lawrence Wright: Iraq Withdrawal Fantasies
• Anita Hill: Clarence Thomas Syndrome
• Doris Lessing: When I Was an Idiot
• Mario Vargas Llosa: Deconstructing 1968

• Joseph Brodsky: Water, Image of Time
• Alberto Manguel: Reading's Miracles
• Tocqueville: America's Provincial Press
• Edith Wharton: Marriage's Slavery
• Edward O. Wilson: Evolution's Creationisms

• Maya Angelou: Color-Blind Canada
• Janet Malcolm: Bad Writing and the Perils of Email
• Kay Gibbons: Ellen Foster Goes Clothes Shopping
• Don DeLillo: Orgasmic OJ ad
• Sinclair Lewis: Screeds of Closed Minds

• F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Bigotry
• Jack Kerouac : Our Victorian Police Forces
• Arthur Koestler: Valuing Man Above Mankind
• Richard Rorty on the Value-Added Rage of the 1960s
• Edmund Wilson on new York City Streets in the 1920s

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez on his mother
• Stephen King on his materialist generation
• Saul Bellow's Augie March on the intelligence of men
• Jonathan Raban on the Junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers
• Louis Brandeis on the Separation of Powers