1. "A Walker in the City": Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and Walt Whitman’s Cartographic Legacy
2. Literary Custom House: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
3. Short Happy Palimpsest: Ernest Hemingway’s "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
4. New York Unearthed: Excavating the Work of Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
5. Black Boys and White Whales: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Conversations with Herman Melville, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin