Offering 59 stories, 458 poems, and 15 plays, the Seventh Edition provides a wealth of classics and contemporaries, canonical favorites and emerging writers. New to the Seventh Edition are pieces by Audre Thomas, Salman Rushdie, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Flannery O'Connor, Seamus Heaney, Marilyn Hacker, Lorraine Hansberry, David Ives, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Laurence, Allen Ginsberg, Nicholson Baker, and Denise Levertov, among many others. The Norton Introduction to Literature offers students more perspectives on the contexts of literature - authorial, literary, cultural, historical, and critical - than any other introductory anthology. Included in the Seventh Edition are three new "Exploring Contexts" chapters. Entitled "Critical Contexts", each includes a literary piece and several examples of professional criticism about that piece to introduce students to the critical discussion surrounding works and authors and to inspire students' own critical writing.