20 new stories, 86 new poems, and 5 new plays -- many appearing for the first time in a college anthology -- include stories by David Foster Wallace, Xu Xi, and Jack London; poems by Kay Ryan and Charles Simic; and plays by Christopher Durang and Nilaja Sun, all chosen to spark students' imagination.
An in-depth chapter on Billy Collins, created with Billy Collins himself. Like its sister chapter on Julia Alvarez, this new case study continues Meyer's emphasis on writers as real people and literature as a living art form. Collins presents 5 of his own poems, explains how and why he writes, and shares photos and pages from his notebooks, including sketches of unpublished works. 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 stories featuring Ron Carlson, Mark Halliday, and Lydia Davis. New chapters on the natural world and on life's milestones explore universal human experiences and include works by Maxine Kumin, Tom Disch, and Anne Carson.
Bedford/St. Martin's new media for literature. Our free and open companion site, bedfordstmartins/meyercompact gathers our best online resources for reading and writing about literature, with tutorials, quizzes, research links, and help for finding and citing sources. VideoCentral: Literature, available for packaging (free) with student editions of the anthology, offers more than 50 video interviews by PBS producer Peter Berkow with authors including T.C. Boyle, Ha Jin, and Anne Rice. (For more information, visit bedfordstmartins.com/videocentral.)