A classic thematic anthology which has long been hailed for its exceptionally rich collection of essays, poems, fiction and poetry, and for its ground-breaking inclusion of classic and contemporary images.
(* Marks New Selections).
I. Art and Composition *II. On Being a Conscious Reader and an Intelligent Writer (new section)
Introduction Notebook
Stephen King, from On Writing
Malcolm X, A Homemade Education
* Flannery O’Connor, The Teaching of Literature
Personal Writing
Virginia Woolf, The Angel in the House
* Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Essays
* Patricia Kubis and Robert M. Howland, How to Develop a Good Style
* Joseph Williams and Greg Colomb, Argument, Critical Thinking, and Rationality
* Italo Calvino, if on a winter’s night a traveler…
* Harold Brodkey, Reading. The Most Dangerous Game
Margaret Atwood, Fiction: Happy Endings Fiction
* Richard Russo, The Whore’s Child Poetry
* Gregory Bilgere, Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel
* Charles Bukowski, How to Be a Good Writer
Cate Marvin, Ocean Is a Word in This Poem
Walt Whitman, Poets to Come
III. The Search for Self and Personal Values
Introduction Notebook
Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went into the Woods
* Eric Brende, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology Personal Writing
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
* Colin Powell, The Good Soldier
* Arnie Kantrowitz, Under the Rainbow
* Jhumpa Lahiri, My Hyphenated Identity
Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple
* Alfred Lubrano, Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
* Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
* Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America Essay
* Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching Fiction
Sandra Cisneros, Hips Poetry
* John Lennon, Working Class Hero
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Dylan Thomas, The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
Denise Levertov, In Mind
Anne Sexton, Her Kind
Theodore Roethke, The Waking
IV. Personal Relationships
Introduction Notebook
Aryeh Lev Stollman, Die Grosse Liebe
Ursula Melendi, All of Heaven for Love (student writing) Personal Writing
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
* Thomas Bierowski, The Red Power Ranger and the Fruit Bat
* Brian Braiker, Just Don’t Call Me Mr. Mom Essays
Andrew Sullivan, If Love Were All
Carson McCullers, Loneliness … an American Malady
The Koran, Sura 12. Joseph
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
* Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Friends, Friends with Benefits, and the Benefits of the Local Mall
Barbara Kingsolver, Somebody’s Baby
Fiction
Kate Chopin, A Respectable Woman
* Harry Mark Petrakis, The Journal of a Wife-Beater
Poetry
* Tupac Shakur, Tears of a Teenage Mother
William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter
Gwendolyn Brooks, Life for My Child Is Simple and Good
Rita Dove, Beauty and the Beast
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 and 116
William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble, The Garden of Love
* Ani Di Franco, Educated Guess
E. E. Cummings, I Like My Body When It Is with Your
V. Education
Introduction Notebook
* David Gelerntner, Unplugged
* Ellen Seiter, Children, Politics, and the Internet
Personal Writing
* Jeffrey Hart, How to Get a College Education
Joan E. Hartman, What We Did and Why We Did It
Essays
Bruno Bettleheim, The Child’s Need for Magic
* Peggy Orenstein, What’s Wrong With Cinderella?
* Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Lewis Thomas , Humanities and Science
Charles Murray, What’s Wrong with Vocational School? Fiction
Amy Tan, Rules of the Game
Anton Chekov, The Bet Poetry
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B
VI. Popular Culture
Introduction Notebook
* Steven Levy, Facebook Grows Up
* Pete Rojas, Bootleg Culture
Personal Writing
* Constance Matthiessen, Harry Potter and Divorce Among the Muggles
Roger Ebert, Great Movies
* Andrea Casassa, The Coffee Shop (student writing) Essays
* Andy Bellin, Poker Nation
* Joe Woodard, Pumped, Pierced, Painted, and Pagan
* David Bartholomew, The Horror Film
* Lisa Finnegan, A Fearful Press
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation Fiction
* Robin Hemley, REPLY ALL Poetry
* Edward Lear, The Jumblies
* Joanna Newsom, Bridges and Balloons
* Phil Kline, The Zippo Texts: Three Rumsfeld Songs
VII. Art and Society
Introduction Notebook
* Melissa Etheridge, Music as a Safe Haven
* Glenn Kurtz, Practicing Personal Writing
V.S. Naipaul, Two Worlds: Nobel Lecture 2001 Essays
E. M. Forster, Art for Art’s Sake
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness
* Scott McCloud, The Language of Comics
John Berger, The Uses of Photography
Christian Amigo, Intervention #1: Musical Openings
Fiction
Willa Cather, The Sculptor’s Funeral Poetry
Sonia Sanchez , A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald
VIII. Science, the Environment, and the Future
Introduction Notebook
Alan Tennant, Great Plains of the Arctic
* Nicholas Kristof, Warm, Warmer, Warmest Personal Writing
Shireen Lee, The New Girls Network Essays
* Stephen Jay Gould, Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs
* David Quammen, Was Darwin Wrong?
* Steve D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics : The Hidden Side of Everything
* Pierre Haski, Electronic Corpses
Gina Kolata, A Clone is Born
* Paul Davies, How to Build a Time Machine Fiction
* Alan Lightman, A Place Where Time Stands Still
* Steven Moffat, “What I Did on My Christmas Holidays” By Sally Sparrow Poetry
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
IX. Freedom and Human Dignity
Introduction Notebook
Leo Braudy, Arms and the Man
* Marilyn Manson, Columbine: Who’s Fault is It? Personal Writing
* Anya Kamenetz, Generation Debt
* Slavenka Drakulic, The Strange Ability of Apartments to Divide and Multiply
* Jorn Rohwer, Beyond Memory Essays
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence; Declaration of the Rights of Man
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia C. Mott, Seneca Falls Convention
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Award Speech
Chief Seattle, Speech on the Signing of the Treaty of Port Elliott
Plato, The Crito
* Cornel West, On Affirmative Action
Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream
Harriet Jacobs, The Women Fiction
Edwidge Danticat, Selection from Breath, Eyes, Memory Poetry
Reynolds Price, Tom, Dying of AIDS
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
* Taha Muhammad Ali, Revenge
X. Globalism, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity
Introduction Notebook
Adam Gopnik, The City and the Pillars
Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet
Elie Wiesel, The America I Love
* Howard Zinn, The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”
* Wesley K. Clark, The Next War Personal Writing
* Charles Barkley and Bill Clinton, Building a Culture of Dignity
* Mohandas K. Gandhi, My Faith in Nonviolence
Essays
Niccolo Machiavelli, On Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared
* Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear
Howard Gardner, Leading Beyond the Nation-State
* Anna Quindlen, Immigration: Newcomers by Numbers
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others Fiction
* Sherman Alexie, What You Pawn I Will Redeem Poetry
Katha Pollitt, Night Subway
* Sarah Little Crow-Russell, Apology to the Wasps
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est