Almost a third of the literature is new. 64 of the 204 selections in the book are new, and include recent work by acclaimed writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Toi Derricotte, Karen Russell, Atul Gawande, and Rebecca Makkai. They appear in such stimulating new clusters as “The Pull of Tradition” (about an arranged marriage complicated by a past love), “Vampires Unleashed” (on how the folklore about bloodsuckers is deeply misleading…until it’s not) and “What Is a Criminal?” (about how frighteningly easy it is to end up on the wrong side of the law, or one’s own conscience).
A new kind of cluster connects literature to current events. In every thematic chapter, “In the News” clusters link literary works with recent news items, demonstrating the ways literature reports on and interprets the human condition. Examples include a grouping of Sophocles’ classic play Antigone with accounts of women fighting repressive regimes today, and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” juxtaposed with a contemporary mother’s op-ed about her son’s departure to a war zone.
The text introduces two new critical reading strategies that generate writing. Chapter 2 shows students how to analyze works of literature by paying attention to how characters talk (by studying their speech acts) and how they feel (by mapping their emotions).
Useful new examples of student writing throughout the text. Of the 11 examples of student writing in the book, 4 are new, including a student-annotated poem, a paper comparing poems, and two annotated research papers, one of which models an assignment of increasing importance: using the ideas of a critical theorist as a lens to write about a literary work.
A full-color portfolio of paired poems and images. Appealing to students’ interest in visuals and instructors’ need to teach how to think critically about them, a new insert at the end of the writing text offers advice on how to analyze images and compare them with poems as it presents a dozen iconic or contemporary images paired with a dozen classic and current poems. Several of these pairings are unique, such as Roland Perez’s prose poem about Edward Hopper’s “Office at Night” and May Miller’s “The Scream,” which may or may not be a response to Edvard Munch’s famous painting of the same title.