Mays - The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Fourteenth Edition

Like its predecessors, this Fourteenth Edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature offers in a single volume a complete course in reading literature and writing about it. A teaching anthology focused on the actual tasks, challenges, and questions typically faced by students and instructors, The Norton Introduction to Literature offers practical advice to help students transform their first impressions of literary works into fruitful discussions and meaningful critical essays, and it helps students and instructors together tackle the complex questions at the heart of literary study.

The Norton Introduction to Literature has been revised with an eye to providing a book that is as flexible, inclusive, and useful as possibleadaptable to many different teaching styles and individual preferencesand that also conveys the excitement at the heart of literature itself.

Featuring ten new stories, over forty-five new poems, and two new plays, as well as a new section on the prose poem, the Fourteenth Edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature is the most inclusive anthology of its kind. Here, you will find exciting, highly teachable new selections by long-familiar, deservedly beloved writersincluding Edgar Allan Poes The Black Cat, William Shakespeares Othello, mouse poems by Robert Burns and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and greatly expanded coverage of Gwendolyn Brooks and Louise Erdrich. But you will find, too, inspiring, vibrant, thought-provoking work by a diverse array of (mostly contemporary) authors utterly new to the anthologyincluding Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Haruki Murakami, Lynn Nottage, Zadie Smith, and Yiyun Li in Fiction and Drama, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, Richard Blanco, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ada Limn, Campbell McGrath, Octavio Paz, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, and Pulitzer Prize winners Natalie Diaz and Claudia Rankine in Poetry. Thanks to these and other additions we have greatly increased, broadened, and deepened representation of Indigenous, Latina/o, Black, and both Asian and Asian American voices and perspectives.

Many of our new selections speak to issues of immediate relevance and concern, from (social) media, gaming, and googling to quarantines (past and present), animal rights, and immigration, to de-industrialization, political polarization, and systemic racism. But in choosing new selections, we have, more than ever, sought to balanceand to help students appreciatethe simultaneously timeless and timely aspects of both classic and contemporary literature and its capacity to humanize and even transform us by encouraging us to consider diverse perspectives and experiences, states of mind, and feeling.

For ease of reference, all new selections are indicated with an asterisk in the table of contents.

One of the most innovative and popular features of The Norton Introduction to Literature are albums inviting students to explore in more depth specific formal elements and contextual reading/writing strategies by comparing works linked by author, subgenre, topic, setting, and so on. The Fourteenth Edition offers eighteen such albums. These include albums of proven value in the classroom now enriched with new works by Louise Erdrich (Telling Stories), Zadie Smith (The Future), Sandra Cisneros (Cross-Cultural Encounters), Octavio Paz (The Art of [Reading] Poetry; Haiku), and Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Saeed Jones (Exploring Gender). But we are also excited to offer three entirely new albums: