Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel and Adventure from National Geographic


Mark Jenkins - 2006
    Today an explorer can make a phone call from the top of Mount Everest and geo-locate himself in the thickest rain forest or the widest desert. Yet despite these advances, few modern adventures get close to the charm and romance of "The Desert Road to Turkestan," "Mysterious Temples of the Jungle," and "Airplanes Come to the Isles of Spice." In those bygone days, the pages of National Geographic were as close as most people could get to high adventure and faraway lands—and here's a chance to recapture them. Alongside noteworthy names like Robert Peary, Amelia Earhart, and Teddy Roosevelt, other less famous travelers take us on long-forgotten trips to places few Americans had gone. We follow as "An American Girl Cycles Across Transylvania," trek "A Thousand Miles Along the Great Wall of China," and glide "By Felucca Down the Nile."Introduced by brief essays that provide context and perspective, these engaging, engrossing selections speak for themselves—and trace the National Geographic Society's growth as it explored the unknown and brought it to readers eager for knowledge of "the world and all that is in it."

Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers


Judy BlumeJacqueline Woodson - 1999
    It's chilling. It's easy to become discouraged, to second-guess everything you write. There seemed to be no one to stand up to the censors ... so I began to speak out about my experiences. And once I did, I found that I wasn't as alone as I'd thought." —from Judy Blume's introduction to Places I Never Meant to Be Judy Blume is not alone: Many of today's most distinguished authors of books for young people have found their work censored or challenged. Eleven of them have contributed original stories to this collection. Along with a story written by the late Norma Klein when she was a student at Barnard College, they comprise a stunning literary achievement as well as a battle cry against censorship. Contributors: • David Klass • Norma Klein • Julius Lester • Chris Lynch • Harry Mazer • Norma Fox Mazer • Walter Dean Myers • Katherine Paterson • Susan Beth Pfeffer • Rachel Vail • Jacqueline Woodson • Paul Zindel

Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis


Christine Montross - 2013
    A new mother is admitted with incessant visions of harming her child. A recent graduate, dressed in a tunic and declaring that love emanates from everything around him, is brought to A&E by his alarmed girlfriend. These are among the patients new physician Christine Montross meets during rounds at her hospital’s locked inpatient ward – and who we meet as she struggles to understand the mysteries of the mind, most especially when the tools of modern medicine are failing us. Beautifully written and deeply felt, Falling into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry and a moving reminder, in the words of the New York Times, of 'our fragile, shared humanity'

When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia


Christopher Bollas - 2015
    He offers his interpretation of how schizophrenia develops, typically in the teens, as an adaptation in the difficult transition to adulthood.  With tenderness, Bollas depicts schizophrenia as an understandable way of responding to our precariousness in a highly unpredictable world.  He celebrates the courage of the children he has worked with and reminds us that the wisdom inherent in human beings—to turn to conversation with others when in distress—is the fundamental foundation of any cure for human conflict.

The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves


Stephen Grosz - 2012
    These beautifully rendered tales illuminate the fundamental pathways of life from birth to death.A woman finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip; a young man loses his wallet. We learn, too, from more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer, the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer. The stories invite compassionate understanding, suggesting answers to the questions that compel and disturb us most about love and loss, parents and children, work and change. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die


Peter Boxall - 2006
    Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.The featured works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others.Addictive, browsable, knowledgeable--1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die will be a boon companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood


Edward M. Hallowell - 1992
    Discusses the causes, symptoms, and treatment of attention-deficit Disorder (ADD).

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures


Vincent Lam - 2005
    A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today’s doctors, patients, and hospitals.Provocative, heartbreaking, and darkly humorous, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures introduces readers to a masterful new voice in fiction. A practicing ER physician, Vincent Lam delivers a precise and intimate portrait of the medical profession in his fiction debut. These twelve interwoven stories follow a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of medical school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evacuation missions, and terrifying new viruses. Winner of the prestigious Giller Prize, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures marks the arrival of a deeply humane and preternaturally gifted writer. Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri are the four ambitious protagonists of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. They fall in love as they study for their exams, face moral dilemmas as they split open cadavers, confront police who rough up their patients, and treat schizophrenics with pathologies similar to their own. In one harrowing story set amidst the 2003 SARS crisis, which the author witnessed firsthand, two of these doctors suddenly become the patients. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures invites us into a world where the ordinary becomes the critical in a matter of seconds. A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today’s doctors, patients, and hospitals.

Good Poems for Hard Times


Garrison KeillorE.E. Cummings - 2005
    Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Jennifer Michael Hecht, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been struck by bad news, who are burdened by stress, or who simply appreciate the power of good poetry.

Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution


Wally Lamb - 2003
    For several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are powerful stories of hope and healing, told by writers who have left victimhood behind. In his moving introduction, Lamb describes the incredible journey of expression and self-awareness the women took through their writing and shares how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow author. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is a true testament to the process of finding oneself and working toward a better day.

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction


Richard Bausch - 1978
    The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.

Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis


Kenneth Paul Rosenberg - 2019
    Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the '50s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults — 40 million Americans — experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the U.S. is the LA County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally ill people living on the streets of Los Angeles is LA County Hospital. There, Dr. Rosenberg begins his chronicle of what it means to be mentally ill in America today, integrating his own moving story of how the system failed his sister, Merle, who had schizophrenia. As he says, "I have to come to see that my family's tragedy is an American tragedy. My family's shame is America's great secret."

Poe's Children: The New Horror


Peter StraubM. Rickert - 2008
    Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.

Atheism: A Reader


S.T. Joshi - 2000
    Arranged to address the most significant questions pertaining to religious belief-the existence of God, immortality, the nature of religious belief, and religion in relation to science, ethics, politics, and society-the selections in this volume present a challenge to religion on all fronts.Included are Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer on the existence of God, Percy Bysshe Shelley on the "argument from design," Lucretius on life after death, David Hume on superstition, Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Christianity's demeaning influence on women's social status, Gore Vidal on modern American fundamentalism, and many other notable writers on controversial issues.Editor S. T. Joshi has carefully selected essays that are eloquent, poignant, satirical, and philosophically rigorous, and has also supplied explanatory annotations and a general introduction that succinctly and forcefully summarizes the atheistic critique of religion.

Literature: A Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Interactive Edition


X.J. Kennedy - 1979
    MyLiteratureLab icons are found in the margins of the text along with a list of media assets at the front of the anthology. The most popular Literature anthology continues to bring students the finest literature from fables to poetweets. The Twelfth Edition of "Literature: An Introductiuon to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing," edited" "by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, includes eleven new stories from students' favorite authors: ZZ Packer's "Brownies," Ray Bradbury's, "The Sound of Thunder," Anne Tyler's, "Teenage Wasteland," David Leavitt's, "A Place I've Never Been" and Isabel Allende's "The Judge's Wife." More than 60 new accessible and engaging poems have been added including former Iraqi soldier Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker," Katha Pollit's "The Mind-Body Problem" as well as poetweets from Lawrence Bridges and Robert Pinsky. In addition, there are new poems from Kay Ryan, Benjamin Alire Saenz, H. D, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, Tami Haaland, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. Three new one-act plays help "ease" students into the study of this genre. The new plays include two comedies-- David Ives's, "Sure Thing" and Jane Martin's "Beauty"--as well as Edward Bok Lee's experimental drama "El Santo Americano." In addition, Milcha Sanchez-Scott's" The Cuban Swimmer "has been added." "