Preface / Joyce Carol Oates
The Cat: A Preface / Daniel Halpern
1. Cat Stories by the Masters
Who Was to Blame? / Anton Chekhov
The Story of Webster / P.G. Wodehouse
The Cat's Paradise / Emile Zola
The Afflictions of an English Cat / Honore de Balzac
Tobermory / Saki
Black Cat / Edgar Allan Poe
2. Cat Poetry from the Canon
My Cat Jeoffry / Christopher Smart
Ode: On the Death of a Favorite Cat ... / Thomas Gray
To a Cat / John Keats
Verses on a Cat / Percy Bysshe Shelley
She Sights a Bird / Emily Dickinson
To a Cat / Algernon Charles Swinburne
A Fable of the Widow and Her Cat / Jonathan Swift
On the Death of a Cat ... / Christina Rossetti
To Winky / Amy Lowell
The Kitten and Falling Leaves / William Wordsworth
The Spinster's Sweet-Arts / Alfred, Lord Tennyson
[The Churlyshe Cat] / John Skelton
3. More Stories About Cats from the Masters
Cat in the Rain / Ernest Hemingway
Dick Baker's Cat / Mark Twain
Lillian / Damon Runyon
from La Chatte: Saha / Colette
The White and Black Dynasties / Theophile Gautier
4. Cat Poetry from the Twentieth Century
The Cat and the Moon / W.B. Yeats
Last Words to a Dumb Friend / Thomas Hardy
Chaplinesque / Hart Crane
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts / Wallace Stevens
Frightened Men / Robert Graves
The Naming of Cats / T.S. Eliot
The China Cat / Walter de la Mare
Peter / Marianne Moore
Sad Memories / Charles Calverly
Lullaby for the Cat / Elizabeth Bishop
The Cats / Weldon Kees
The Happy Cat / Randall Jarrell
Poem / William Carlos Williams
5. More Stories About Cats. Mrs. Bond's Cats / James Herriot
Death of a Favorite / J.F. Powers
The Best Bed / Sylvia Townsend Warner
from I Am a Cat / Soseki Natsume
6. Cat Poetry in Translation
Black Cat / Rainer Maria Rilke
Cat ; The cat ; Cats / Charles Baudelaire
Woman and Cat / Paul Verlaine
White Cats / Paul Valery
[Beware of Kittens] ; Young Tomcats' Society for Poetic Music / Heinrich Heine
The Cats of Saint Nicholas / George Seferis
Cat / Pablo Neruda
7. Contemporary Storytellers on Cats
The White Cat / Joyce Carol Oates
The Islands / Alice Adams
Puss in Boots / Angela Carter
Schrodinger's Cat / Ursula K. Le Guin
Amateur Voodoo / Francine Prose
8. Contemporary Poets on Cats
Cleanliness / Stephen Dunn
Hoppy / Reginald Gibbons
Sisterhood / Daniel Halpern
Divination by a Cat / Anthony Hecht
Wild Gratitude / Edward Hirsch
Kitty and Bug / John Hollander
Esther's Tomcat / Ted Hughes
The Cat / Galway Kinnell
The Thing About Cats / John L'Heureux
The Cat / William Matthews
My cat and i / Roger McGough
Catnip and Dogwood / Howard Moss
Poem for Pekoe / Robert Phillips
The Cats of Balthus / Bin Ramke
Without Violence / Pattiann Rogers
Cat & the Weather / May Swenson
Touch of Spring / John Updike. Pleasure, Pleasure / Theodore Weiss
9. Whimsical Cat Tales
The Tale of the Cats / Italo Calvino
Cat and Mouse in Partnership / The Brothers Grimm
Four Fables / Aesop
The Cat That Walked by Himself / Rudyard Kipling
[The Cheshire-Cat] / Lewis Carroll
Cat and King ; Cat and Youth ; John Mortonson's Funeral ; A Cargo of Cat / Ambrose Bierce
A Friendly Rat / W.H. Hudson
The Little Red Kitten / Lafcadio Hearn
10. Whimsical Cat Poems
The Owl and the Pussy-cat / Edward Lear
Two Nursery Rhymes / Anonymous
The Old Cat and the Young Mouse / La Fontaine
The Vain Cat / Ambrose Bierce
The Mysterious Cat / Vachel Lindsay
from archy & mehitabel / Don Marquis
11. The Truth About Cats
Dogs and Cats ; The Lives of Two Cats / Pierre Loti
On Cats / Guy de Maupassant
The Cat of Egypt / Herodotus
My Cat / Montaigne
Hodge / James Boswell
An Appreciation / Chateaubriand
Hinse of Hinsefeld / Walter Scott
A Letter of Condolence / Thomas Gray
In Memoriam / Robert Southey
The Cats of Balthus / Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Reivers: Cats / William Faulkner
A Humble Petition ... / Benjamin Franklin
The Roaming Cat / Adlai Stevenson
Dogs Vis-a-Vis Cats / Roy Blount, Jr