Literature: The Human Experience is based on a simple premise: All students can and will connect with literature if the works they read are engaging, exciting, and relevant. Accordingly, every edition of this classroom favorite has featured a broad range of enticing stories, poems, plays, and essays that explore timeless, ever-resonant themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, and the presence of death. The affordable new edition, with a new co-author, freshens the successful formula with an infusion of contemporary literature and a more focused approach to making connections — across time and cultures — between literature and life.