Rereading America

Intended as a reader for writing and critical thinking courses, this volume presents a collection of writings promoting cultural diversity, encouraging readers to grapple with the real differences in perspectives that arise in our complex society.

Rereading America has remained the most widely adopted book of its kind because of its unique approach to the issue of cultural diversity. Unlike other multicultural composition readers that settle for representing the plurality of American voices and cultures, Rereading America encourages students to grapple with the real differences in perspectives that arise in our complex society. With extensive editorial apparatus that puts readings from the mainstream into conversation with readings from the margins, Rereading America provokes students to explore the foundations and contradictions of our dominant cultural myths.

Includes the stories “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”—set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine A “hypnotic” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas—including the inspirations behind the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption—from Stephen King, bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters. This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In “The Body,” four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.” “The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is,” hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons.

This indispensable text reader provides a broad-ranging and thoughtfully organized feminist introduction to the ongoing controversies of development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Designed for use in a variety of college courses, the volume collects an influential group of essays first published in Latin American Perspectives--a theoretical and scholarly journal focused on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. The reader is organized into thematic sections that focus on work, politics, and culture, and each section includes substantive introductions that identify key issues, trends, and debates in the scholarly literature on women and gender in the region. Demonstrating the rich and multidisciplinary nature of Latin American studies, this collection of timely, empirical studies promotes critical thinking about women's place and power; about theory and research strategies; and about contemporary economic, political, and social conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Valuable as both a supplementary or primary text, Rereading Women makes a convincing claim for a materialist feminist analysis. It convincingly shows why women have become an increasingly important subject of research, acknowledges their gains and struggles over time, and explores the contributions that feminist theory has made toward the recognition of gender as a relevant--indeed essential--category for analyzing the political economy of development.

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. He is America’s most widely translated author (into more than eighty languages), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics in the United States, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. The breadth and depth of new critical study of London’s work in recent decades attest to his newfound respectability. London criticism has moved beyond a traditional concerns of realism and naturalism as well as beyond the timeworn biographical focus to engage such theoretical approaches as race, gender, class, post-structuralism, and new historicism. The range and intellectual energy of the essays collected here give the reader a new sense of London’s richness and variety, especially his treatment of diverse cultures. Having in the past focused more on London’s personal "world,” we are now afforded an opportunity to look more closely at his art and the numerous worlds it uncovers.

The book of Ruth seems simple. It is the tale of a poor Moabite widow who relocates to Bethlehem and finds security there when she marries Boaz, a wealthy Israelite man. Although the plot is simple, the book’s message is elusive. Re(reading Ruth) demonstrates how careful attention to the book’s structure, allusions, wordplay, and location in the canon can reveal the dynamic ways that it engages with other biblical stories and how that engagement shapes its message.