Reading and Literature Studies Unit

Expectations

We are going to explore how to read for meaning.  We will look at different text forms and style elements. We will also work on building vocabulary. Finally, we are going to reflect on the skills and strategies you have, and have developed in this unit.

Reading

Reading is fundamental.

“Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.” -Northrop Frye.

In your day, think about how many times you come across:

1. instructional and informational texts

   • instructions

   • news

2. literary texts

   • stories

   • descriptions

   • essays

   • biographies

   • dialogues

   • novels

   • scripts

   • poems

3. graphical texts

   • websites

   • textbooks

   • magazines

   • diagrams

   • photographs

   • drawings

   • sketches

   • graphs

   • schedules

   • maps

   • charts

   • tables

   • timelines

Do you ever actively consider the stylistic elements of these forms? 

Do you read for pleasure?

How do you deal with new words, or words you are unsure about?

Text Forms

Literary

Literary texts come in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, with many forms and genres. Each uses language and literary elements in particular ways to communicate something significant.

Fiction

Some of the elements of fiction are characters, plot, setting, theme (big idea), perspective (point- of-view taken by the narrator), style, language, and structure.

Dramas (scripts and dialogues) use many of the same elements as novels and short stories, but may include special features such as stage directions, acts and scenes, and notations.

Poems use elements such as structure, rhythm, rhyme, imagery and figurative language to communicate an idea, feeling or image.

Non-fiction

Non-fiction literary texts include biographies and essays.

Biographies often tell the story of their subject through narrative elements. Elements of biography include setting (how it influences the events in the person's life), characterization of the subject (representation of the subject's character and motives), theme, accuracy, structure (time sequence), illustrations, graphic features, structural patterns, and organizational features (table of contents, index, references).

Essays might be persuasive, personal, or descriptive but often use the same elements to communicate a significant idea or viewpoint. These elements include thesis, introduction, body, conclusion, arguments, and evidence.

Informational and Graphical

Graphical Texts communicate ideas visually.  Informational texts will often include a graphical text.

Print features

• typeface and size of type

• bullets

• titles

• headings & subheading

• italics

• labels

• captions

Organizational features

• tables of contents

• legends

• keys

• pronunciation guides

• labels

• captions

Design features

• colour

• shape

• line

• placement

• balance

• focal point

• images

Organizational patterns

• sequential

• categorical

• explanatory

Examples of Text Forms and Features

Examples of Text Forms and Features has graphical examples of the terms outlined in this section.

Reading Strategies

Reading strategies are tools that you can use before, during and after you have read a text.

Before you read

• Brainstorm

  • What do you already know about this topic or form?

• Recall an experience or feeling related to the subject or theme

• List questions you might have. Ask them.

• Increase your background knowledge:

  • The author

  • The form

  • Don't read a summary

As you read

Predicting

• Determine what you think will happen in the text.

• Use the title, text and illustrations to help you.

Questioning

• Stop and ask yourself questions to see if the text makes sense.

Activating prior knowledge

• Think about what has already happened in the text, a similar text, or a personal connection.

Inferencing

• Use clues in the text and your own knowledge to fill in the gaps and draw conclusions

  • What details are included?

  • Why did the author tell you that?

  • What details have been left out?

  • Why didn't the author tell you this?

Monitoring

• When you do not understand a part of a text:

  • Stop and think about what you have already read

  • Define words

  • Ask for clarification

  • Visualize

  • Adjusting

  • Rereading

Adjusting

• Adjust your reading rate.  You can slow down or speed up,  read silently or aloud.

Rereading

• Reread the text if you need more information.

Decoding

• Look at the picture

• Try saying the word out loud

• Say the word slowly out loud

• Chunk the word

• Skip the word in the sentence, then reread the sentence

• Change the vowel sound from short to long:

  • apple - acorn

  • elephant - eel

  • iguana - ice cream

  • octopus - oatmeal

  • umbrella - unicorn

• Ask for help

Graphic Organizers

• Use a Graphic Organizer for to keep track of main ideas, important details and questions.

Visualize

• Visualize concepts you have read. 

• Can you relate to your 5 senses? (Touch, Smell, Taste, Hear, See)

After you read

Retell or paraphrase with partner 

• What differences did you have?

• What similarities?

Summarize by focusing on the elements of fiction:

• Character

• Setting

• Events

• Theme

Graphic Organizers

• Use a Graphic Organizer for to keep track of main ideas, important details and questions.

• Use a specific tool like a Word Web graphic organizer to help you with unfamiliar words.

Reading Instructional and Informational Texts

Instructions give detailed step-by-step information about a process or a procedure.  They are sometimes called procedures or how-tos.

Examples of Text Forms and Features has graphical examples of the terms outlined in this section.

Examples of instructions include:

• directions

• recipes

• experiments

• manuals

• tests

Most instructions use:

• organizational patterns

• language

• features include:

  • diagrams and illustrations

  • bold or italic type

  • headings

  • numbers

  • lists

These help the reader identify the task and the best way to complete it. 

If these features are not all present, or the instructions are complicated, you need a framework to help you read and understand.

A Framework for Reading Instructions

• Preview

• Highlight and annotate

• Think aloud and visualize

• Reread

• Go step-by-step

• Read the diagrams

• Ask questions

Reading Informational Texts

Examples of Text Forms and Features has graphical examples of the terms outlined in this section.

Before Reading

• Set a purpose for reading. Ask yourself why you are reading this particular text.

• Look over the text to see which elements appear (such as headings, subheadings, illustrations

• and captions, etc.).

• Examine the titles, headings, and subheadings, and scan for words that stand out.

• Look for words and phrases that might give you clues about how the information is organized.

• Read any overviews, summaries or questions. In a shorter piece, read the opening and concluding sentences or paragraphs.

• Examine each illustration and read the titles or captions.

• Recall what you already know about the topic.

• Record some questions you might have about the topic.

During Reading

• Divide the reading task into smaller chunks (chunking the text into paragraphs, chunking sections by sub-headings, etc.). Read a chunk, pause and think about what you read, and write a brief one-sentence summary or brief point-form notes to help you remember important and interesting information.

• Read quickly, then slowly. Skim the sections you think will support your purpose for reading. When you find specific information you want, slow down and read it word by word. You may need to reread the passage several times.

• Read the selection and jot down thoughts, responses to your questions and new questions that occur to you.

After Reading

• Read the selection again to confirm the main idea and supporting details.

• Make connections to what you already know about the topic. How does the information you have read add to or alter what you knew about the topic?

• Record your thinking about and responses to the text. For example, write a summary, complete a graphic organizer, create a sketch, or orally retell to yourself or a friend.

Reading Graphical Texts

Examples of Text Forms and Features has graphical examples of the terms outlined in this section.

Before Reading

• Set a purpose for reading. Ask yourself why you are reading this particular text.

• Look over the text to determine what type it is and which elements are used.

• Examine the titles, headings, captions and images. Start with the title. The title tells you what the graphic is about. The captions may also use words and phrases from the text to show how the graphic is related to the information in the written text (e.g., “Figure 1.6”).

• Recall what you already know about the topic or subject.

• Record some questions you might have about the information presented.

During Reading

• Read all the labels and examine how they are related to the graphic. Each label has a purpose. The most important labels may be in capital letters, bold type, or a larger font.

• Follow the arrows and lines. They may be used to show movement or direction, or connect to the things they name.

• Look for the use of colour or symbols to emphasize important words and information. Some graphical texts have a legend or a key to explain the meaning of specific symbols and colours.

• Study the image carefully. See if you recognize the details in the image. Read the text near the picture to find an explanation of the information in the graphic. Use the figure number or title and key words to find and read the related information in the written text.

• Identify the relationships among the visuals and information presented.

After Reading

• Interpret the information conveyed in any of the graphics (e.g., diagrams, charts, graphs, maps). Ask yourself why this information might be important.

• Rephrase information orally or in writing. Imagine that you are explaining the graphic to someone who has not read it.

• Create your own graphical text (e.g., graph, map, diagram, table, flow chart) to represent the important information.

Reading Literary Texts

Before Reading

• Read the title and think about what might happen in the story or what the essay might be about. Does the title suggest any connections to your own life or raise any questions?

• Recall other selections you may have read by this author.

• Look at any illustrations. What do they tell you about the story or subject?

• Look the text over and sample the text to note its length, organization, level of language, and structure. Pay attention to punctuation.

During Reading

• As you read, ask questions about what is happening. Make predictions about what might happen next.

• Form opinions about what is going on. Think about your responses and reactions to what you are reading. Making notes can help you focus your thinking as you read.

• Picture the setting, events or images in your mind. Sketch them. As you read, imagine how the words will be spoken and see the action.

• While reading a narrative selection, try the following:

  • Read the first page and pause. What do you know so far about the people (characters), setting, conflict, and point of view? Where do you think the storyline is going? Make connections to what you already know.

  • Who are the people and how are they related to each other? Put yourself in their place. What would you say or do?

• Use a Graphic Organizer for to keep track of main ideas, important details and questions.

After Reading

• Write down favourite quotations from the text. Share and compare them with a partner.

• Create a visual interpretation of the text, such as a web, story map, or timeline, to show the relationships among the major characters and their feelings and attitudes.

• Create a sensory web of the setting. Use a graphic organizer to illustrate the story’s plot or sequence of events (situation, complications, climax, resolution).

• Retell/summarize the content in your own words, orally or in writing.

Posters for Instruction: Reading

Theme

The theme is an understanding about life that the writer wishes to share with the reader. The theme is usually closely tied to the change a character undergoes in the story, or is something the character learns as a result of the situations that occur in the story.  It is the meaning or purpose of the story.

Theme

The theme is a general statement about life or human experience that an author makes through the specific events in his work.

It is the central insight in a work of fiction.

The story writer is an observer of life and an interpreter of it.

General questions to ask

What insights into life does the story reveal?

What view of life does the story give?

The theme is discovered by asking

How did the main character change and what has he/she learned?

What is the conflict of the story and what is its outcome?

Is the title a clue to understanding the meaning of the story?

Principles for discovering theme

Theme must be expressed in the form of a statement, with subject and predicate.

Theme must be stated as a generalisation about life, not about a specific character in a story.  It makes statements about all humans.

Theme should not be reduced to some familiar saying or cliche. For example: You can't teach and old dog new tricks. Or, truth vs falsehood.

Theme is the central and unifying concept of the story. All incidents must refer back to the statement of theme and not contradict it.

Examples of Text Forms and Features

Short Stories

The short stories are divided into two groups. Some will be read, discussed and written about in class, others will be used for the Short Story Assignment.

In Class

Black Coffee by Menaka Raman-Wilms

For Pari by David Dupont

Green Velvet by Krzysztof Pelc

I Am Aani Littlecrab by Julia Jenkins

Everyone Has Come by Jasmina Odor

The Duolect by Krzysztof Pelc

Assignment

Mirror Image by Lena Coakley

The Prospector’s Trail by Cathy Jewison

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

Love Must Not Be Forgotten by Zhang Jie

Saturday Climbing by W.D. Valgardson

The Maiden Wiser Than the Tsar by Idries Shah

The Storyteller by Saki

Bluffing by Gail Helgason

The Labrador Fiasco by Margaret Atwood

Snow by Ann Beattie

A Secret Lost in the Water by Roch Carrier

The Pose by Anwer Khan

The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek

 The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

Brooms for Sale by Thomas Raddall

The Liberation of Rome by Robin Hemley

Test by Theodore Thomas

Soul-Catcher by Louis Owens

Wilhelm by Gabrielle Roy

He-y, Come on Ou-t! by Shinichi Hoshi

The Singing Silence by Eva-Lis Wuorio

World Literature - The Chaotic Age

In the appendix to Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, Bloom lists his favourite writers, and sorts them by geographic location. This is a list from what Bloom calls The Chaotic Age (20th Century and onwards).

My copy of this list has gone missing, but Robert Teeter has recreated one.  This is a copy of Mr. Teeter's list.

Italy

Luigi Pirandello

Naked Masks: Five Plays

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Maia: In Praise of Life

Dino Campana

Orphic Songs

Umberto Saba

Stories and Recollections

Poems

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Leopard

Giuseppe Ungaretti

Selected Poems

The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems

Eugenio Montale

The Storm and Other Things: Poems

The Occasions: Poems

Cuttlefish Bones: Poems

Otherwise: Last and First Poems

The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays

Salvatore Quasimodo

Selected Writings: Poems and Discourse on Poetry

Tommaso Landolfi

Gogol's Wife and Other Stories

Leonardo Sciascia

Day of the Owl

Equal Danger

The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Poems

Cesare Pavese

Hard Labor: Poems

Dialogues with Leucò

Primo Levi

If Not Now, When?

Collected Poems

The Periodic Table

Italo Svevo

The Confession of Zeno

As a Man Grows Older

Giorgio Bassani

The Heron

Natalia Ginzburg

Family

Elio Vittorini

Women of Messina

Alberto Moravia

1934

Andrea Zanzotto

Selected Poetry

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

The Baron in the Trees

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

t zero

Antonio Porta

Kisses from Another Dream: Poems

Spain

Miguel de Unamuno

Three Exemplary Novels

Our Lord Don Quixote

Antonio Machado

Selected Poems

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Invisible Reality: Poems

Pedro Salinas

My Voice Because of You: Poems

Jorge Guillén

Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet

Vicente Aleixandre

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

Federico Garcia Lorca

Selected Poems

Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo Alba

Rafael Alberti

The Owl's Insomnia: Poems

Luis Cernuda

Selected Poems

Miguel Hernández

Selected Poems

Blas de Otero

Selected Poems

Camilo José Cela

The Hive

Juan Goytisolo

Space in Motion

Catalonia

Carles Ribá

Selected Poems

J. V. Foix

Selected Poems

Joan Perucho

Natural History

Merce Rodoreda

The Time of the Doves

Pere Gimferrer

Selected Poems

Salvador Espríu

La Pell de Brau: Poems

Portugal

Fernando Pessoa

The Keeper of Sheep

Poems

Selected Poems

Always Astonished: Selected Poems

The Book of Disquiet

Jorge de Sena

Selected Poems

José Saramago

Baltasar and Blimunda

José Cardoso Pires

Ballad of Dogs' Beach

Sophia de Mello Breyner

Selected Poems

Eugénio de Andrade

Selected Poems

France

Anatole France

Penguin Island

Thaïs

Alain-Fournier

Le Grand Meaulnes

Marcel Proust

Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)

Andre Gide

The Immoralist

Corydon

Lafcadio's Adventure (The Caves of the Vatican)

The Journals

Colette

Collected Stories

Retreat from Love

Georges Bataille

Blue of Noon

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the End of Night

René Daumal

Mount Analogue

Jean Genet

Our Lady of the Flowers

The Thief's Journal

The Balcony

Jean Giraudoux

Four Plays

Alfred Jarry

Selected Works

Jean Cocteau

The Infernal Machine and Other Works

Guillaume Apollinaire

Selected Writings

André Breton

Poems

Manifestoes of Surrealism

Paul Valéry

The Art of Poetry

Selected Writings

René Char

Poems

Paul Éluard

Selected Poems

Louis Aragon

Selected Poems

Jean Giono

The Horseman on the Roof

Michel Leiris

Manhood

Raymond Radiguet

Count d'Orgel's Ball

Jean-Paul Sartre

No Exit

Nausea

Saint Genet

The Words

The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert

Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex

Albert Camus

The Stranger

The Plague

The Fall

The Rebel

Henri Michaux

Selected Writings

Edmond Jabès

The Book of Questions

Selected Poems

Saint-John Perse

Anabasis

Birds

Exile and Other Poems

Pierre Reverdy

Selected Poems

Tristan Tzara

Seven Dada Manifestoes

Max Jacob

Selected Poems

Pierre-Jean Jouve

Selected Poems

Francis Ponge

Things: Selected Writings

Jacques Prévert

Paroles

Philippe Jacottet

Selected Poems

Charles Péguy

The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc

Bejamin Péret

Selected Poems

Andé Malraux

The Conquerors

The Royal Way

Man's Fate

Man's Hope

The Voices of Silence

François Mauriac

Therese

The Desert of Love

The Woman of the Pharisees

Jean Anouilh

Becket

Antigone

Eurydice

The Rehearsal

Eugène Ionesco

The Bald Soprano

The Chairs

The Lesson

Amédée

Victims of Duty

Rhinoceros

Maurice Blanchot

Thomas the Obscure

Pierre Klossowski

The Laws of Hospitality

The Baphomet

Raymond Roussel

Locus Solus

Antonin Artaud

Selected Writings

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques

Alain Robbe-Grillet

The Voyeur

Jealousy

In the Labyrinth

The Erasers

Project for a Revolution in New York

For a New Novel

Nathalie Sarraute

The Use of Speech

The Planetarium

Claude Simon

The Grass

The Wind

The Flanders Road

Marguerite Duras

The Lover

Four Novels

Robert Pinget

Fable

The Libera Me Domine

That Voice

Michel Tournier

The Ogre

Friday

Marguerite Yourcenar

Coup de Grace

Memoirs of Hadrian

Jean Follain

Transparence of the World: Poems

Yves Bonnefoy

Words in Stone

Great Britain and Ireland

William Butler Yeats

The Collected Poems

Collected Plays

A Vision

Mythologies

George Bernard Shaw

Major Critical Essays

Heartbreak House

Pygmalion

Saint Joan

Major Barbara

Back to Methuselah

John Millington Synge

Collected Plays

Sean O'Casey

Juno and the Paycock

The Plough and the Stars

The Shadow of a Gunman

George Douglas Brown

House with the Green Shutters

Thomas Hardy

The Well-Beloved

The Woodlanders

The Return of the Native

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Far From the Madding Crowd

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure

Collected Poems

Rudyard Kipling

Kim

Collected Stories

Puck of Pook's Hill

Complete Verse

A. E. Housman

Collected Poems

Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson

Seven Men and Two Others

Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim

The Secret Agent

Nostromo

Under Western Eyes

Victory

Ronald Firbank

Five Novels

Ford Madox Ford

Parade's End

The Good Soldier

W. Somerset Maugham

Collected Short Stories

The Moon and Sixpence

John Cowper Powys

Wolf Solent

A Glastonbury Romance

Saki (H. H. Munro)

The Short Stories

H. G. Wells

The Science Fiction Novels

David Lindsay

A Voyage to Arcturus

Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale

Walter De la Mare

Collected Poems

Memoirs of a Midget

Wilfred Owen

Collected Poems

Isaac Rosenberg

Collected Poems

Edward Thomas

Collected Poems

Robert Graves

Collected Poems

King Jesus

Edwin Muir

Collected Poems

David Jones

In Parenthesis

The Anathemata

John Galsworthy

The Forsyte Saga

E. M. Forster

Howards End

A Passage to India

Frank O'Connor

Collected Stories

D. H. Lawrence

Complete Poems

Studies in Classic American Literature

Complete Short Stories

Sons and Lovers

The Rainbow

Women in Love

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

To the Lighthouse

Orlando: A Biography

The Waves

Between the Acts

James Joyce

Dubliners

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Ulysses

Finnegans Wake

Samuel Beckett

Murphy

Watt

Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable

Waiting for Godot

Endgame

Krapp's Last Game

How It Is

Elizabeth Bowen

Collected Stories

J. G. Farrell

The Siege of Krishnapur

Henry Green

Nothing

Loving

Party Going

Evelyn Waugh

A Handful of Dust

Scoop

Vile Bodies

Put Out More Flags

Anthony Burgess

Nothing Like the Sun

G. B. Edwards

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

Iris Murdoch

The Good Apprentice

Bruno's Dream

Graham Greene

Brighton Rock

The Heart of the Matter

The Power and the Glory

Christopher Isherwood

The Berlin Stories

Norman Douglas

South Wind

Aldous Huxley

Collected Essays

Antic Hay

Point Counter Point

Brave New World

Lawrence Durrell

Alexandria Quartet

William Golding

Pincher Martin

Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

Mervyn Peake

The Gormenghast Trilogy

Jeanette Winterson

The Passion

W. H. Auden

Collected Poems

The Dyer's Hand

Roy Fuller

Collected Poems

Gavin Ewart

Selected Poems

Basil Bunting

Collected Poems

William Empson

Collected Poems

Milton's God

Some Versions of Pastoral

George Wilson Knight

The Wheel of Fire

The Burning Oracle

R. S. Thomas

Poems

Frank Kermode

The Sense of an Ending

Stevie Smith

Collected Poems

F. T. Prince

Collected Poems

Philip Larkin

Collected Poems

Donald Davie

Selected Poems

Geoffrey Hill

Collected Poems

Jonathan Spence

The Death of Woman Wang

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

Elizabeth Jennings

Selected Poems

Keith Douglas

The Complete Poems

Hugh MacDiarmid

Complete Poems

Louis MacNeice

Collected Poems

Dylan Thomas

The Poems

Nigel Dennis

Cards of Identity

Seamus Heaney

Selected Poems: 1969-1987

Field Work

Station Island

Thomas Kinsella

Peppercanister Poems

Paul Muldoon

Selected Poems

John Montague

Selected Poems

John Arden

Plays

Joe Orton

The Complete Plays

Flann O'Brien

The Dalkey Archive

The Third Policeman

Tom Stoppard

Travesties

Harold Pinter

The Caretaker

The Homecoming

Edward Bond

The Fool

Saved

George Orwell

Collected Essays

1984

Edna O'Brien

A Fanatic Heart

Germany

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Poems and Verse Plays

Selected Prose

Selected Plays and Libretti

Rainer Maria Rilke

Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies)

The Sonnets to Orpheus

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

New Poems: First Part and Other Part

Hermann Broch

The Sleepwalkers

The Death of Virgil

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time

Georg Trakl

Selected Poems

Gottfried Benn

Selected Poems

Franz Kafka

Amerika

The Complete Stories

The Blue Octavo Notebook

The Trial

The Diaries

The Castle

Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms

Bertolt Brecht

Poems, 1913-1956

The Threepenny Opera

The Good Woman of Setzuan

Mother Courage and Her Children

Galileo

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Arthur Schnitzler

Plays and Stories

Frank Wedekind

Lulu Plays

Spring Awakening

Karl Krauss

The Last Days of Mankind

Günter Eich

Moles

Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain

Stories of Three Decades

Joseph and His Brothers

Doctor Faustus

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

Alfred Döblin

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Hermann Hesse

The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)

Narcissus and Goldmund

Robert Musil

Young Törless

The Man Without Qualities

Joseph Roth

The Radetzky March

Paul Celan

Poems

Thomas Bernhard

Woodcutters

Heinrich Böll

Billiards at Half-Past Nine

Ingeborg Bachmann

In the Storm of Roses

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems

Walter Benjamin

Illuminations

Robert Walser

Selected Stories

Christa Wolf

Cassandra

Peter Handke

Slow Homecoming

Max Frisch

I'm Not Stiller

Man in the Holocene

Günter Grass

The Tin Drum

The Flounder

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The Visit

Johannes Bobrowski

Shadow Lands

Russia

Anna Akhmatova

Poems

Leonid Andreyev

Selected Tales

Andrey Bely

Petersburg

Osip Mandelshtam

Selected Poems

Velimir Khlebnikov

The King of Time

Vladimir Mayakovsky

The Bedbug and Selected Poetry

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and the Margarita

Mikhail Kuzmin

Alexandrian Songs

Maksim Gorky

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev

Autobiography

Ivan Bunin

Selected Stories

Isaac Babel

Collected Stories

Boris Pasternak

Doctor Zhivago

Selected Poems

Yury Olesha

Envy

Marina Tsvetayeva

Selected Poems

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Nervous People and Other Satires

Andrei Platonov

The Foundation Pit

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

The Cancer Ward

The Gulag Archipelago

August 1914

Joesph Brodsky

A Part of Speech: Poems

Scandinavia

Isak Dinesen

Winter's Tales

Seven Gothic Tales

Martin Andersen Nexø

Pelle the Conqueror

Knut Hamsun

Hunger

Pan

Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter

Gunnar Ekelöf

Guide to the Underworld

Tomas Tranströmer

Selected Poems

Pär Lagerkvist

Barabbas

Lars Gustafsson

Selected Poems

Serbo-Croat

Ivo Andric

The Bridge on the Drina

Vasko Popa

Selected Poems

Danilo Kis

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Czech

Karel Capek

War with the Newts

R.U.R

Vaclav Havel

Largo Desolato

Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Jaroslav Seifert

Selected Poetry

Miroslav Holub

The Fly

Polish

Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Czeslaw Milosz

Selected Poems

Witold Gombrowicz

Three Novels

Stanislaw Lem

The Investigation

Solaris

Zbigniew Herbert

Selected Poems

Adam Zagajewski

Tremor

Hungarian

Attila József

Perched on Nothing's Branch

Ferenc Juhasz

Selected Poems

Laszlo Németh

Guilt

Modern Greek

C. P. Cavafy

Collected Poems

George Seferis

Collected Poems

Nikos Kazantzakis

The Greek Passion

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

Yannis Ritsos

Exile and Return

Odysseas Elytis

What I Love: Selected Poems

Angelos Sikelianos

Selected Poems

Yiddish

Sholem Aleichem

Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories

The Nightingale

Mendele Mokher Seforim

The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third

I. L. Peretz

Selected Stories

Jacob Glatstein

Selected Poems

Moshe-Leib Halpern

Selected Poems

H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern)

Selected Poems

Israel Joshua Singer

The Brothers Ashkenazi

Yoshe Kalb

Chaim Grade

The Yeshiva

S. Ansky

The Dybbuk

Mani Leib

Selected Poems

Sholem Asch

East River

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Collected Stories

In My Father's Court

The Manor, the Estate, the Family Moskat

Satan in Goray

Hebrew

Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Shirot Bialik: The Epic Poems

S. Y. Agnon

In the Heart of the Seas

Twenty-One Stories

Aharon Appelfeld

The Immortal Bartfuss

Badenheim 1939

Yaakov Shabtai

Past Continuous

Yehuda Amichai

Selected Poetry

Travels

A. B. Yehoshua

A Late Divorce

Amos Oz

A Perfect Peace

T. Carmi

At the Stone of Losses

Nathan Zach

Selected Poems

Dalia Ravikovitch

A Dress of Fire

Dan Pagis

Selected Poems

David Shahar

The Palace of Shattered Vessels

David Grossman

See Under: Love

Yoram Kaniuk

His Daughter

Arabic

Najib Mahfuz

Midaq Alley

Fountain and Tomb

Miramar

Adunis

Selected Poems

Mahmud Darwish

The Music of Human Flesh

Taha Husayn

An Egyptian Childhood

Latin America

Rubén Dário

Selected Poetry

Jorge Luis Borges

The Aleph and Other Stories

Dreamtigers (The Maker)

Ficciones

Labyrinths

A Personal Anthology

Alejo Carpentier

Explosion in a Cathedral

The Lost Steps

Reasons of State

The Kingdom of This World

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Three Trapped Tigers

View of Dawn in the Tropics

Severo Sarduy

Maitreya

Reinaldo Arenas

The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando

Pablo Neruda

Canto General

Residence on Earth

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Fully Empowered

Selected Poems

Nicolás Guillén

Selected Poems

Octavio Paz

The Collected Poems

The Labyrinth of Solitude

César Vallejo

Selected Poems

Spain, Take This Cup from Me

Miguel Angel Asturias

Men of Maize

José Lezama Lima

Paradiso

José Donoso

The Obscene Bird of Night

Julio Cortázar

Hopscotch

All Fires the Fire

Blow-up and Other Stories

Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love in the Time of Cholera

Mario Vargas Llosa

The War of the End of the World

Carlos Fuentes

A Change of Skin

Terra Nostra

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Travelling in the Family

The West Indies

C. L. R. James

The Black Jacobins

The Future in the Present

V. S. Naipaul

A Bend in the River

A House for Mr. Biswas

Derek Walcott

Collected Poems

Wilson Harris

The Guyana Quartet

Michael Thelwell

The Harder They Come

Aimé Césaire

Collected Poetry

Africa

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

Arrow of God

No Longer at Ease

Wole Soyinka

A Dance of the Forest

Amos Tutuola

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town

Christopher Okigbo

Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder

John Pepper Clark (-Bekederemo)

Casualties: Poems

Ayi K. Armah

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Wa Thiong'o Ngugi

A Grain of Wheat

Gabriel Okara

The Fisherman's Invocation

Nadine Gordimer

Collected Stories

J. M. Coetzee

Foe

Athol Fugard

A Lesson from Aloes

Léopold S. Senghor

Selected Poems

India (in English)

R. K. Narayan

The Guide

Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Heat and Dust

Canada

Malcolm Lowry

Under the Volcano

Robertson Davies

The Deptford Trilogy

The Rebel Angels

Alice Munro

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Northrop Frye

Fables of Identity

Anne Hébert

Selected Poems

Jay Macpherson

Poems Twice Told

Margaret Atwood

Surfacing

Daryl Hine

Selected Poems

Australia and New Zealand

Miles (Stella) Franklin

My Brilliant Career

Katherine Mansfield

The Short Stories

A. D. Hope

Collected Poems

Patrick White

Riders in the Chariot

A Fringe of Leaves

Voss

Christina Stead

The Man Who Loved Children

Judith Wright

Selected Poems

Les A. Murray

The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems

Thomas Keneally

The Playmaker

Schindler's List

David Malouf

An Imaginary Life

Kevin Hart

Peniel and Other Poems

Peter Carey

Oscar and Lucinda

Illywhacker

The United States

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Selected Poems

Robert Frost

The Poetry

Edith Wharton

Collected Short Stories

The Age of Innocence

Ethan Frome

The House of Mirth

The Custom of the Country

Willa Cather

My Ántonia

The Professor's House

A Lost Lady

Gertrude Stein

Three Lives

The Geographical History of America

The Making of Americans

Tender Buttons

Wallace Stevens

Collected Poems

The Necessary Angel

Opus Posthumous

The Palm at the End of the Mind

Vachel Lindsay

Collected Poems

Edgar Lee Masters

Spoon River Anthology

Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie

An American Tragedy

Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio

Death in the Woods and Other Stories

Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt

It Can't Happen Here

Elinor Wylie

Last Poems

William Carlos Williams

Spring and All

Paterson

Collected Poems

Ezra Pound

Personae: Collected Poems

The Cantos

Literary Essays

Robinson Jeffers

Selected Poems

Marianne Moore

Complete Poems

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Selected Poems

John Crowe Ransom

Selected Poems

T. S. Eliot

The Complete Poems and Plays

Selected Essays

Katherine Anne Porter

Collected Stories

Jean Toomer

Cane

John Dos Passos

U.S.A

Conrad Aiken

Collected Poems

Eugene O'Neill

Lazarus Laughed

The Iceman Cometh

Long Day's Journey Into Night

e. e. cummings

Complete Poems

John B. Wheelwright

Collected Poems

Robert Fitzgerald

Spring Shade: Poems

Louise Bogan

The Blue Estuaries: Selected Poems

Léonie Adams

Poems: A Selection

Hart Crane

Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose

Allen Tate

Collected Poems

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

The Great Gatsby

Tender is the Night

William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying

Sanctuary

Light in August

Absalom, Absalom!

The Sound and the Fury

The Wild Palms

The Collected Stories

The Hamlet

Ernest Hemingway

Complete Short Stories

A Farewell to Arms

The Sun Also Rises

The Garden of Eden

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Nathanael West

Miss Lonelyhearts

A Cool Million

The Day of the Locust

Richard Wright

Native Son

Black Boy

Eudora Welty

Collected Stories

Delta Wedding

The Robber Bridegroom

The Ponder Heart

Langston Hughes

Selected Poems

The Big Sea

I Wonder as I Wander

Edmund Wilson

The Shores of Light

Patriotic Gore

Kenneth Burke

Counter-statement

A Rhetoric of Motives

Joseph Mitchell

Up in the Old Hotel

Abraham Cahan

The Rise of David Levinsky

Kay Boyle

Three Short Novels

Ellen Glasgow

Barren Ground

Vein of Iron

John P. Marquand

H. M. Pulham, Esquire

John O'Hara

Collected Stories

Appointment in Samarra

Henry Roth

Call It Sleep

Thornton Wilder

Three Plays

Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men

World Enough and Time

Selected Poems

Delmore Schwartz

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge

Weldon Kees

Collected Poems

Elizabeth Bishop

The Complete Poems

John Berryman

Collected Poems

Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky

Randall Jarrell

Complete Poems

Charles Olson

The Maximus Poems

Collected Poems

Robert Hayden

Collected Poems

Robert Lowell

Collected Poems

Theodore Roethke

Collected Poems

Straw for the Fire

James Agee

Permit Me Voyage

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Jean Garrigue

Selected Poems

May Swenson

New & Selected Things Taking Place

In Other Words

Robert Duncan

Bending the Bow

Richard Wilbur

New and Collected Poems

Richard Eberhart

Collected Poems

M. B. Tolson

Harlem Gallery

Kenneth Koch

Seasons on Earth

Frank O' Hara

Selected Poems

James Schuyler

Collected Poems

James Baldwin

The Price of a Ticket

Saul Bellow

Seize the Day

The Adventures of Augie March

Herzog

John Cheever

The Stories

Bullet Park

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man

Truman Capote

In Cold Blood

Carson McCullers

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Flannery O'Connor

Complete Stories

The Violent Bear It Away

Wise Blood

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

Pale Fire

Gore Vidal

Myra Breckenridge

Lincoln

William Styron

The Long March

J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

Nine Stories

Wright Morris

Ceremony in Lone Tree

Bernard Malamud

The Stories

The Fixer

Norman Mailer

Advertisements for Myself

The Executioner's Song

Ancient Evenings

John Hawkes

The Cannibal

Second Skin

William Gaddis

The Recognitions

Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie

A Streetcar Named Desire

Summer and Smoke

Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

Edwin Justus Mayer

Children of Darkness

Harold Brodkey

Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Ursula K. LeGuin

The Left Hand of Darkness

Raymond Carver

Where I'm Calling From

Robert Coover

Spanking the Maid

Don DeLillo

White Noise

Libra

Running Dog

Mao II

John Crowley

Little, Big

Aegypt

Love and Sleep

Guy Davenport

Tatlin!

James Dickey

The Early Motion

The Central Motion

E. L. Doctorow

The Book of Daniel

World's Fair

Stanley Elkin

The Living End

William H. Gass

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Omensetter's Luck

Russell Hoban

Riddley Walker

Denis Johnson

Angels

Fiskadoro

Jesus' Son

Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian

Suttree

Child of God

William Kennedy

Ironweed

The Albany Cycle

Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon

Gloria Naylor

The Women of Brewster Place

Joyce Carol Oates

Them

Walker Percy

The Moviegoer

Grace Paley

The Little Disturbances of Man

Thomas Pynchon

V

The Crying of Lot 49

Gravity's Rainbow

Cynthia Ozick

Envy, or Yiddish in America

The Messiah of Stockholm

Ishmael Reed

Mumbo Jumbo

Philip Roth

Portnoy's Complaint

My Life as a Man

Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue

The Counterlife

Patrimony

Operation Shylock

James Salter

Solo Faces

Light Years

Robert Stone

Dog Soldiers

A Flag for Sunrise

John Barth

The Floating Opera

The End of the Road

The Sot-Weed Factor

Walter Abish

Alphabetical Africa

How German Is It

Eclipse Fever

I Am the Dust Under Your Feet

Donald Barthelme

Forty Stories

The Dead Father

Thomas M. Disch

On Wings of Song

Paul Theroux

The Mosquito Coast

John Updike

The Witches of Eastwick

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Cat's Cradle

Edmund White

Forgetting Elena

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

James McCourt

Time Remaining

James Wilcox

Modern Baptists

A. R. Ammons

Collected Poems

Selected Longer Poems

Sphere: The Form of a Motion

John Ashbery

The Double Dream of Spring

Houseboat Days

Selected Poems

Flow Chart

Hotel Lautréamont

And the Stars Were Shining

David Mamet

American Buffalo

Speed-the-Plow

David Rabe

Streamers

Sam Shepard

Seven Plays

August Wilson

Fences

Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Anthony Hecht

Collected Earlier Poems

Edgar Bowers

Living Together: New and Selected Poems

Donald Justice

Selected Poems

James Merrill

From the First Nine

The Changing Light at Sandover

W. S. Merwin

Selected Poems

James Wright

Above the River: The Complete Poems

Galway Kinnell

Selected Poems

Philip Levine

Selected Poems

Irving Feldman

New and Selected Poems

Donald Hall

The One Day

Old and New Poems

Alvin Feinman

Poems

Richard Howard

Untitled Subjects

Findings

John Hollander

Reflections on Espionage

Selected Poetry

Tesserae

Gary Snyder

No Nature: New and Selected Poems

Charles Simic

Selected Poems

Mark Strand

Selected Poems

The Continuous Life

Dark Harbor

Charles Wright

The World of the Ten Thousand Things

Jay Wright

Dimensions of History

The Double Invention of Komo

Selected Poems

Elaine's Book

Boleros

Amy Clampitt

Westward

Allen Grossman

The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected

Howard Moss

New Selected Poems

James Applewhite

River Writing: An Eno Journal

J. D. McClatchy

The Rest of the Way

Alfred Corn

A Call in the Midst of the Crowd

Douglas Crase

The Revisionist

Rita Dove

Selected Poems

Thylias Moss

Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems

Edward Hirsch

Earthly Measures

Tony Kushner

Angels in America