Poetry & Short Story Reference Source contains selected works of major and minor American and English poets, along with a wide range of international poetry. Works include plays and speeches, short stories and classic books, biographies, critical analyses, contextual essays and explications for important works, essays on poetic forms, literary terms, techniques and movements, multimedia (audio and video) of poets reading their works, and interviews from reputable sources.
Literary Reference Plus is a full-text database that combines information from major respected reference works, books, and literary journals. It includes thousands of full-text poems, short stories, synopses, critical essays, literary journals, reference books and author biographies, plus lesson plans and literary study guides.
The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature by 
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story by 
Nepantla Familias: an anthology of Mexican American literature on families in between worlds by 
A House of My Own: stories from my life by 
Fiction 100: an anthology of short fiction by 
Stories from the Kitchen by 
The Story and Its Writer: an introduction to short fiction by 
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories by 
The Toughest Indian in the World by 
Blasphemy: new and selected stories by 
Walking the Clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction by 
Earth Song, Sky Spirit: short stories of the contemporary Native American experience by 
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by 
Spunk: the selected short stories of Zora Neale Hurston by 
Zora Neale Hurston: an annotated bibliography of works and criticism by 
Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (LOA #75) by 
Thank You, Mr. Nixon by
The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Resisters takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is a unique book that only Jen could write--a story collection accruing the power of a novel as it proceeds--a work that Cynthia Ozick has called "an art beyond art. It is life itself." Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to "poor Mr. Nixon" in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change. Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans "like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes"; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their "number-one daughter" in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on "no politics, just make money," finds she must reassess her mother's philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon furnishes yet more proof of Gish Jen's eminent place among American storytellers.
Understanding Gish Jen by
Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a "typical American" writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who's Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one's path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review. Ho traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen's observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen's accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives. Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines each of Jen's major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. Looking beyond Jen's fiction work, a final chapter examines her essays and her concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.
Americas of Asian American Literature by
Drawing on a wide array of literary, historical, and theoretical sources, Rachel Lee addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender. Lee argues that scholars have traditionally placed undue emphasis on ethnic-based political commitments--whether these are construed as national or global--in their readings of Asian American texts. This has constrained the intelligibility of stories that are focused less on ethnicity than on kinship, family dynamics, eroticism, and gender roles. In response, Lee makes a case for a reconceptualized Asian American criticism that centrally features gender and sexuality. Through a critical analysis of select literary texts--novels by Carlos Bulosan, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, and Karen Yamashita--Lee probes the specific ways in which some Asian American authors have steered around ethnic themes with alternative tales circulating around gender and sexual identity. Lee makes it clear that what has been missing from current debates has been an analysis of the complex ways in which gender mediates questions of both national belonging and international migration. From anti-miscegenation legislation in the early twentieth century to poststructuralist theories of language to Third World feminist theory to critical studies of global cultural and economic flows, "The Americas of Asian American Literature" takes up pressing cultural and literary questions and points to a new direction in literary criticism.
Offspring Fictions by
Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie¿s Family Novels is the first book-length study that examines families and especially the parent-child relationship in Rushdie¿s core works. It argues that Sigmund Freud¿s concept of the family and the author¿s variations thereon are central to a full understanding of the four novels Midnight¿s Children, Shame, the controversial The Satanic Verses and The Moor¿s Last Sigh, a quasi-sequel to Rushdie¿s first success. Through close readings that make use of a variety of critical approaches, Offspring Fictions provides a sustained examination of how the parents and children that people Rushdie¿s fictions reflect the larger issues his work is concerned with: nationalism, religion, history and authorship. Aimed primarily at academics and students, but also of interest to the general reader, Offspring Fictions provides a clear and insightful analysis of Rushdie¿s family tetralogy.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Rushdie¿s Tetralogy
Introduction
Chapter 1: Reading the Novels
Midnight¿s Children
Chapter 2: The Child Is Father of the Man: Creating Progeny in Midnight¿s Children
Chapter 3: Days Full of Potential Mothers and Possible Fathers: Saleem Sinai¿s Multiple Family Romances
Chapter 4: ¿The Mother-Goddess In Her Most Terrible Aspect¿: The Murder of Childhood and Dialogue
Shame
Chapter 5: Sins of the Parents: Monstrous Mothers and Absent Fathers
Chapter 6: ¿Discrete Parameters of a Family Squabble¿: Family Antagonisms
The Satanic Verses
Chapter 7: Absent Fathers and Fallen Sons: The Satanic Verses
Chapter 8: ¿Pleasechu Meechu, Hopeyu Guessma Nayym¿: Giving a Voice to Satanic Doubt
The Moor¿s Last Sigh
Chapter 9: Uprooting the Family Tree: The Moor¿s Last Sigh
Chapter 10: Conflicting Parents, Contesting Authors: Who Writes the Moor?
Chapter 11: From Ganesh to Dumbo: The First and the Last of the Family Novels
Select Bibliography
Index
Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie by 
Midnight's Children by
Edited by Joel Kuortti, a specialist in Salman Rushdie's works and post-colonial and transcultural writing, this volume presents a variety of new essays on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children marked a change in global literary scene as it inaugurated a heightened interest in writings from the formerly colonized countries. There had been post-colonial writings before but in its richness, full with magical realistic depiction and historiographical narration, Rushdie's novel became a trendsetter. Since its publication in 1981, Midnight's Children has been translated into several languages and, in 2012, adapted into a film. The essays in the volume discuss topics such as ethics, nationalism, translation, and the culture of globalization. Rounding out the volume is a bibliography of other important critical sources for readers seeking to study the novel and its themes further.
This Is How You Lose Her: short stories by
Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award A Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012 Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more... "Electrifying." -The New York Times Book Review "Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize... Díaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." -O Magazine From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, these stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever."
Junot Díaz by
In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz's imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing--especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. Saldívar examines several aspects of Díaz's career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the Américas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldívar shows how Díaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.
Reading Junot Diaz by
Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz's writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.
The Fiction of Junot Díaz by
The influence of Latin American writers--as well as other immigrant writers and their first-generation peers--has reframed the literary lens to include multiple views and codify the shift away from the tradition of white male writers who formed the core of the American literary canon for generations. Junot D az is one of the most prominent and influential writers in contemporary American literature. A first-generation Dominican American, the New Jersey native is at the forefront of a literary renaissance, portraying the significant demographic shifts taking place in the United States. In The Fiction of Junot D az: Reframing the Lens, Heather Ostman closely examines the linguistic, popular culture, and literary references woven throughout D az's fiction, including the short story collections Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Ostman also considers D az's work as it relates to issues of identity, citizenship, culture, aesthetics, language, class, gender, and race. By exploring how D az reframes the immigrant narrative--highlighting his innovative linguistic and genre-based approach--Ostman provides crucial insights into how D az's writings relate to key issues in today's world. The Fiction of Junot D az will be of interest to scholars and students of the immigrant experience as well as fans of this gifted writer.
American Identities: contemporary multicultural voices by
More than three dozen voices offer diverse expressions of the dynamic interaction between subculture and the American consciousness, and many answers to the question of how to "construct a 'self' from the materials of life in our contentious and often incoherent culture."
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story by
A treasure for readers and teachers alike, this anthology culls together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including for the first time in a literary anthology science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Writers like Usula Le Guin, Ken Liu and Stephen King are placed next to some of the often-taught geniuses of the form Grace Paley, Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson.
