by Tom Nissley
Velikovsky, Immanuel, 263
Verlaine, Paul, 13, 218
Verne, Jules, 92, 400
Vertigo (Sebald), 184
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers), 88
Vian, Boris, 81, 196
Victim, The (Bellow), 372
Vidal, Gore, 132, 295, 305, 314, 383
Village Voice, 410
Vinge, Vernor, 6
Virgil, 181, 298
Vision, A (Yeats), 338
Visit from the Goon Squad, A (Egan), 153
Vita nuova (Dante), 181
Vitti, Jon, 230
Vivian Grey (Disraeli), 80, 388
Vogel, Henriette, 366
Vollmann, William T., 236, 363
Voltaire, 160, 211, 346, 353, 366, 385
von Ardenne, Elizabeth, 372
von Däniken, Erich, 162
von Doderer, Heimito, 402
von Mises, Ludwig, 321
Vonnegut, Kurt, 52, 63, 185, 253, 303, 338, 356, 373
Vortigern (Ireland), 107
Vowell, Sarah, 406
Vox (Baker), 254
Voyage of the Beagle, The (Darwin), 312
W., Bill, 390
Wagner, Erica, 382
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 217, 392
Waitkus, Eddie, 187
Walcott, Derek, 28
Walden (Thoreau), 128
Walker, Alice, 48, 258
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 209
Wallace, David Foster, 51, 60, 87, 95, 104, 105, 141, 172, 193, 289, 324, 362, 363, 398
Wallace, Edgar, 82
Wallace, George, 101
Wallace, Irving, 202
Wallace, Lew, 111, 296
Wallechinsky, David, 44
Wallis, Henry, 267
Walpole, Horace, 96
Walpole, Hugh, 302
Walser, Robert, 120, 404
Walter, Natasha, 371
Walton, Izaak, 394
Wambaugh, Joseph, 27, 80
Wanderer (Hayden), 20
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 194, 335, 381, 392
War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 34
Ward, Lynd, 201
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 54
Ware, Chris, 300, 407
Warlock (Hall), 269
Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 140
Warren, Robert Penn, 170, 243, 246, 292
Warren Report, The, 251, 304
wars: Bosnian, 183; Civil, 70, 72, 99, 111, 210, 221, 361, 370; Iraq, 370; Korean, 159, 220; Spanish-American, 164; Vietnam, 46, 96, 159, 203, 332, 357, 380; World War I, 47, 78, 86, 178, 209, 216, 242, 243, 253, 276, 279, 282, 290, 314, 345, 359, 369, 405; World War II, 23, 36, 52, 86, 100, 102, 131, 145, 146, 161, 166, 175, 178, 194, 211, 214, 216, 239, 276, 286, 306, 341, 365, 379, 396
Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, The, 216
Washington, Booker T., 110
Wasserstein, Wendy, 35
Waste Land, The (Eliot), 29, 56, 74, 103, 105
Watergate, 134, 192, 284, 291, 336
Waters, Sarah, 229
Watership Down (Adams), 236
Watson, James D., 52
Watson, John H., 200
Watterson, Bill, 213, 400
Watts, Alan, 361
Watts, Charlie, 195
Waugh, Evelyn, 23, 115, 143, 156, 267, 339
Waverley (Scott), 43
Waves, The (Woolf), 217
Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 18, 186
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 80, 353
Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 385
Weaver, Courtney, 304
Webb, Beatrice, 147
Webster, Noah, 167
Webster’s New International Dictionary, 67, 323
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 323
Wedekind, Frank, 80
“Weeds, The” (McCarthy), 293
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A (Thoreau), 16
Wee Willie Winkie, 339
Weil, Simone, 40, 267
Weir, David, 334
Weird Tales, 74
Welch, Denton, 409
Welch, James, 247, 345
Weldon, Fay, 299
Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 361
Wells, H. G., 31, 34, 68, 298, 304
Wells, Ida B., 292
Welsh, Irvine, 304
Welty, Eudora, 118, 185, 213
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Shriver), 113
“We Real Cool” (Brooks), 171
Werfel, Alma Mahler, 290
Werfel, Franz, xi, 269, 290
Wertham, Fredric, 100, 385
Wertheim, Stanley, 298
Weschler, Lawrence, 368
Wescott, Glenway, 116
West, Anthony, 302, 304
West, Dorothy, 259
West, Nathanael, 118, 328, 370, 401
West, Rebecca, 54, 86, 304
Westlake, Donald E., 199, 410
Wetherell, W. D., 345
Whalen, Philip, 318
Wharton, Edith, 12, 29, 112, 143, 213, 222, 260, 277, 323, 339, 360, 382
What If the Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s Management (Iwasaki), 383
What It Is (Barry), 248
“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (White), 34
What the Dead Know (Lippman), 100
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver), 27, 216
Wheatley, Phillis, 384
“When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” (Whitman), 105, 120
When the World Was Steady (Messud), 173
When You Reach Me (Stead), 132
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (Semple), 392
“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (Welty), 185
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 129
White, E. B., 107, 133, 219, 388
White, Edmund, 18, 224
White, Gilbert, 199, 391
White, Katharine, 302
White, Patrick, 167, 388
White, T. H., 22
White, William Allen, 34
White Album, The (Didion), 375
Whitehead, Alfred North, 286
Whitehead, Colson, 73
White Noise (DeLillo), 235, 277
White Teeth (Smith), 3, 5
Whitman, Sarah Helen, 26
Whitman, Walt, 97, 99, 104, 105, 120, 170, 212, 246, 355, 361
“Whitsun Weddings, The” (Larkin), 139, 167, 354
Whoreson (Goines), 330
“Why I Live at the P.O.” (Welty), 213
Why No Revival? (Chick), 118
Why Orwell Matters (Hitchens), 285
Why We Run (Heinrich), 315
Wideman, John Edgar, 48, 187
Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 331, 350
Widmerpool, Kenneth, 214
Wife of Martin Guerre, The (Lewis), 289
Wikipedia, 180, 284
Wilberforce, William, 237
Wilbur, Richard, 333
Wilde, Oscar, 10, 43, 107, 126, 301, 327, 375
Wilder, Billy, 176, 333
Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 22, 49
Wilder, Thornton, 386
Will (Liddy), 192, 284
Willems, Mo, 50
Williams, Garth, 133, 232
Williams, George Washington, 245
Williams, John, 74, 277, 289
Williams, Joy, 50
Williams, Tennessee, 19, 64, 82, 104, 134, 197
Williams, William Carlos, 66, 74, 192
“William Wilson” (Poe), 24
Willis, Connie, 410
Willson, Meredith, 188
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (Carver), 175
Wilson, Angus, 170, 402
Wilson, August, 313
Wilson, Edmund, 20, 90, 185, 211, 213, 293, 375, 399
Winchester, Simon, 305
Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame), 149, 282, 369, 396
Wind, Sand, and Stars (Saint-Exupéry), 409
“Wine of Wizardry, A” (Sterling), 281
Wi
nfrey, Oprah, 301
Wings of the Dove, The (James), 79, 282
Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne), 264
Winsor, Kathleen, 165, 328
Winter, Michael, 227
Winterson, Jeanette, 270
Winter World (Heinrich), 315
Wirt, Mildred, 303
Wise Blood (O’Connor), 57
Wister, Owen, 229
Within the Context of No Context (Trow), 263
With Walt Whitman in Camden (Traubel), 99
Witlings, The (Burney), 245
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 51, 131, 305, 336
Wittgenstein’s Poker (Edmonds and Eidinow), 336
Wodehouse, P. G., 53, 101, 211, 252, 321, 326, 359
Wolf, Christa, 304, 380
Wolf Among Wolves, A (Fallada), 36
Wolfe, Gene, 146
Wolfe, Thomas, 212, 217, 292, 327
Wolfe, Tom, 40, 73, 116, 160, 326
Wolff, Duke, 367
Wolff, Geoffrey, 83, 367
Wolff, Kurt, 56, 107
Wolff, Larry, 101
Wolff, Tobias, 192, 216, 367
Wolf Hall (Mantel), 30
Wolk, Douglas, 335
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 132, 287
Womack, Dooley, 269
Woman Adrift (Owen), 54
Woman in White, The (Collins), 234
Woman’s Life, A (Maupassant), 339
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 320
Wood, Evelyn, 13
Wood, James, 149, 211, 324, 326, 346
Wood, Michael, 328, 367
Woodburn, John, 61
Woodson, Carter G., 38, 385
Woodward, Bob, 97, 336
Woodward, C. Vann, 396
Woolf, Virginia, xiv–xv, 30, 48, 50, 99, 110, 135, 143, 212, 217, 248, 259, 273, 279, 316, 322, 329, 340, 361, 373
Woollcott, Alexander, 47, 388
Woolrich, Cornell, 302
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 30, 117, 314
Wordsworth, William, 25, 112, 117, 221, 267, 271, 275, 314, 358
Working (Terkel), 191
Worlds in Collision (Velikovsky), 263
Worst Journey in the World, The (Cherry-Garrard), 151, 208
Wouk, Herman, 146
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 153
Wright, Lawrence, 262
Wright, Richard, 51, 100, 168, 172, 281, 316, 322, 356
Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle), 311
Wroblewski, David, 152
Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 20, 91, 212, 216
Wyndham, John, 82
Yacoubian Building, The (Aswany), 73
Yagoda, Ben, 160
Yates, Richard, 65, 352
Year of Magical Thinking, The (Didion), 402, 409
Yeats, William Butler, 33, 36, 129, 338, 385, 389
Y. Cheung, Business Detective (Keeler), 27
Yefimov, Boris, 312
Yerby, Frank, 374
Yerkes, Charles Tyson, 43
Yezierska, Anzia, 366, 396
Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The (Chabon), 3, 410
Yorke, Henry. See Green, Henry
You Are Not a Stranger Here (Haslett), 229
You Can’t Take It with You (Kaufman and Hart), 301
You Can’t Win (Black), 9
Young, Chic, 14
You Only Live Twice (Fleming), 244
Yourcenar, Marguerite, 29, 126, 181
Youth (Conrad), 36
Yugen, 270
Zamperini, Louis, 166
Zeitoun (Eggers), 274
Zero History (Gibson), 180
Žižek, Slavoj, 92
Zmuda, Joe, 191
Zola, Émile, 18, 108, 109, 118, 177, 214, 306
Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm), 349
Zweig, Stefan, 62, 373
Copyright © 2014 by Tom Nissley
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Joanna Neborsky
All rights reserved
First Edition
Excerpt from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock, translation copyright © 1984 by David McLintock. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission. Beton by Thomas Bernhard © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1982. All rights by and controlled through Surhkamp Verlag Berlin.
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