Literature Help

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

Teachers, media specialists, parents, and other adults who work with adolescents must recognize that our society influences who teenagers are and how they develop as language users. This unique resource provides guidance to these professionals by pairing literacy specialists with counselors who introduce information about social issues important to today's adolescents. These experts then explore literature in which issues such as: body image, sexuality, and leaving home are addressed in ways likely to interest teens. By examining fictional characters, these experts provide guidance to those working with teenagers, so they can encourage adolescents to deal with the conflicts and issues imposed upon them by our society while improving their reading and writing skills. Eight important social issues are explored each in a separate chapter. While providing in-depth exploration of fictional characters grappling with these societal issues, each chapter also provides a question and answer section in which specialists answer questions many adults have raised regarding social influences on teenagers. Readers are given insight into how they can help teenagers with similar problems, and extensive annotated bibliographies recommend appropriate books to get teenagers reading and addressing these problems. This collaboration across academic specialties provides an innovative approach to attaining the goal of helping adults and adolescents in gaining a better understanding of each other.

Today, traditional illnesses and high risk behaviors of adolescents have become interrelated through the multitude of physical, social and emotional changes young people experience. Good literature which gives adolescents the truth has incredible power to heal and to renew. This reference resource provides a link for teachers, media specialists, parents, and other adults to those novels that can help adolescents struggling with health issues. Educators and therapists explore novels where common health issues are addressed in ways to captivate teens. Using fictional characters, these experts provide guidance on encouraging adolescents to cope while improving their reading and writing skills. With the advancement in medicine, traditional types of health issues such as birth defects, cancer, and sensory impairment have shifted to more behavior related problems such as depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders. All of these issues and others are examined from both a literary and psychological perspective in thirteen chapters that explore health issues through fiction. Each chapter confronts a different health issue and is written by a literature specialist who has teamed up with a therapist. In each novel, these experts define the central character's struggle in coming to terms with an issue and growing in response to their difficulties. Annotated bibliographies of other works, both fiction and nonfiction, explore these same issues give readers insight into helping teenagers with similar problems, and provide the tools with which to get teenagers reading and addressing these problems.

Arun Deep’s I.C.S.E. Complete Course English Literature [Includes Julius Caesar, Treasure Chest A Collection of ICSE Poems and Short Stories] for Class 10 has been meticulously crafted to cater to the specific needs of students in the 10th grade. The book is designed to provide comprehensive guidance for effective exam preparation, ensuring students secure higher grades. Its primary objective is to assist any I.C.S.E. student in achieving the best possible grade by offering support throughout the course and valuable advice on revision and exam preparation. The material is presented in a clear and concise format, featuring ample questions for practice. This book strictly adheres to the latest syllabus outlined by the Council for the I.C.S.E. Examinations from 2025 onwards. It includes detailed answers to the questions found in the Textbook Complete Course English Literature [Includes Julius Caesar, Treasure Chest A Collection of ICSE Poems and Short Stories] Class 10, published by Evergreen Publications Pvt. Ltd. The author of this book is Dr. J. Randhawa.

“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.

Love hurts. Breaking up is hard to do. For all the joy that relationships and friendships can bring, showing romantic interest, establishing boundaries, and expressing identities as partners and friends isn’t easy for teens. They navigate an often ugly social universe. Even commonplace struggles can derail academic focus and harm emotional health. English teachers hope to give students communication skills, a love of literature, a passport to an intellectually vibrant life rich in opportunity. Through discussions of canonical works of literature, assignment ideas, anecdotes from teaching, and student perspectives, this book outlines how an academically rigorous English class can also heal, empower, and provide wisdom for teens weathering storms in their social lives. English class is health class. Widely taught novels brim with rich lessons about courtship, love, heartbreak, sexuality, bonds, and belonging. Learning to write stories, reflections, and arguments, speak confidently, and listen critically gives students powerful tools for self-expression, advocacy, and empathy in their relationships and friendships. The stakes are high and the rewards far-reaching. Students with healthier social lives do better academically, but they also end up becoming more responsible, caring grown-ups capable of improving an adult society that too often feels unsafe and tragically bereft of compassion.

“Consistently entertaining… always poised, eloquent, and full of moments of tenderness.” —Electric Literature The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Alternatingly wistful and wry, ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to shape a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments.

The #1 New York Times bestselling novel and basis for the Academy Award-winning film—a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She’s full of ambition, but without a husband, she’s considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write a tell-all book about work as a black maid in the South, that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town...