New stories, poems, and plays that students will want to read — many appearing for the first time in a student anthology — include stories by David Foster Wallace, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Jack London; poems by Kay Ryan and Charles Simic; and plays by Christopher Durang and Josefina Lopez. The 21 stories, 92 poems, and 6 plays new to this edition represent traditional, multicultural, contemporary, and popular literature — and include classics that have long made classroom discussion come alive.
An in-depth chapter on Billy Collins, created with Billy Collins. Five of Collins’ own poems appear alongside compelling personal insights into each work — written specifically for Michael Meyer’s anthologies — plus a delightful collection of rare photographs and manuscript pages. Like its sister chapter created with Julia Alvarez, this new collection shows poetry as a living, changing art form. Once again, students will hear a major poet speak directly to them, this time in Collins’ one-of-a-kind style, about how he writes, why he writes, and the kinds of surprises that come up along the way. As Collins explains, "More interesting to me than what a poem means is how it travels."
3 new thematic case studies include a new chapter of lively Short Short Fiction featuring Sandra Cisneros, Ron Carlson, and Margaret Atwood. Two new chapters in the Poetry section, one on the Natural World and the other on Milestones explore universal human experiences, and include works by such authors as Maxine Kumin, Edward Hirsch, and Anne Carson.
Bedford/St. Martin’s Video Central for Literature. Thirty new video interviews — with authors including T.C. Boyle, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Ha Jin, Anne Rice, and Gish Jen — show students that writing (even for the famous!) requires practice, revision, and a sense of humor. This resource is available for free when packaged with the anthology through the Student Center Web site.