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A Writer's Reader

by: Hall, Donald; Emblen, D.L.

A Writer's Reader

by: Hall, Donald; Emblen, D.L.

ISBN 13:
9780321087485
ISBN 10:
0321087488
Edition: 9th
Format: Paperback
Copyright: 07/16/2001
Publisher: Pearson

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Summary

Highly respected poets, Hall and Emblem have chosen classical and contemporary selections to make this a delightful writer's companion, now in it's ninth edition. A Writer's Reader is a collection of essays, short stories, and poems organized alphabetically by author. Several readings by the same author are provided for a closer look at a writer's style. A rhetorical and thematic index is included to allow readers a way of cross-referencing selections. Overall, A Writer's Reader contains an appealing range of types of selections-essays, a few short stories, a lecture, and a few poems. The collection includes both classic and contemporary writers-such as Maya Angelou, W.H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Tillie Olsen, Brent Staples, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, and many others.MARKET For anyone interested in a neatly arranged and useful collection of inspiring short readings.

Preface

xxiii

The Importance of Dissimulation

(9)

Shirley Abbott

``Being a belle has its risks, the worst of which is that she may be permanently seduced by her own propaganda.''

The Importance of Touch

(8)

Diane Ackerman

``Mammals prefer to use odors when they can, spining scent songs as complex and unique as bird songs, which also travel on the air.''

A White Woman of Color

(7)

Julia Alvarez

``We were a progression of coloring, as if my mother were slowly bleaching the color out of her children.''

Mr. Red Leg

(5)

Maya Angelou

``So during the age when Mother was exposing us to certain facts of life, like personal hygiene, proper posture, table manners, good restaurants and tipping practices, Daddy Clidell taught me to play poker, blackjack, tonk and high, low, Jick, Jack and the Game.''

Pornography

(6)

Margaret Atwood

``In a society that advertises and glorifies rape or even implicitly condones it, more women get raped. It becomes socially acceptable.''

Alien Territory

(6)

Margaret Atwood

``Every morning I get down on my knees and thank God for not creating me a man.''

A Native Hill

(10)

Wendell Berry

``The pristine America that the first white men saw is a lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea.... I walk knee-deep in its absence.''

Some Devil's Definitions

(4)

Ambrose Bierce

``Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.''

Objections Noted: Word Processing

(5)

Sven Birkerts

``Writing on the word processor: It's like eating those force-fed new chickens that have never seen sunlight. Like eating fish bred in indoor pools.''

Miss Cooper and Me

(4)

Louise Bogan

``Sometimes I think that, between us, my mother and I must have invented Miss Cooper; this is impossible, however, because of our splendid ignorance of the materials of which Miss Cooper was composed.''

The Pseudo-Event

(7)

Daniel J. Boorstin

``If we test Presidential candidates by their talents on TV quiz performances, we will, of course, choose presidents for precisely these qualifications.''

Watch Out for Traffic Jams on the Information Highway

(4)

Michael Booth

``Not doubt any hope for a massive popular resistance to all the new information technology is fleeting.''

The Bean Eaters

(1)

Gwendolyn Brooks

``Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away.''

A Small, Good Thing

(20)

Raymond Carver

``Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. `I wanted to kill you,' she said. `I wanted you dead.'''

My Father's Life

(8)

Raymond Carver

``He was skinny and pale and looked bewildered. His pants wouldn't stay up. He didn't look like my dad.''

Errand

105

(10)

Raymond Carver

``Nevertheless, Chekhov was impressed with the solicitude shown by Tolstoy's visit. But, unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov didn't believe in an after life and never had.''

If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire

115

(13)

Michelle Cliff

``Were the other women unable to touch this girl because of her darkness? I think that now.''

Primary Lessons

128

(6)

Judith Ortiz Cofer

```It's not fair, it's not fair. I can't go to school here. I don't speak Spanish.' It was my final argument, and it failed miserably because I was shouting in the language I claimed not to speak.''

Marginalia

134

(2)

Billy Collins

``... and next to them, written in soft pencil---by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet---`Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'''

A Yo-Yo Going Down

136

(7)

Frank Conroy

``The witty monsense of Eating Spaghetti, the surprise of The Twirl, the complex neatness of Cannoball, Backwards Round the World, or Halfway Round the World---I could do them all.''

Burl's

143

(9)

Bernard Cooper

``But it was the woman in the purple dress who passed nearest me, and I saw that her jaw was heavily powdered, a half-successful attempt to disguise the tell-tale shadow of a beard.''

Looking After

152

(4)

John Daniel

``... much of the time the names had come loose from their moorings, like boats adrift on the sea.''

Last Words

156

(10)

Joan Didion

``This was a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them.''

Plantation Life

166

(5)

Frederick Douglass

``As I received my first impressions of slavery on this plantation, I will give some description of it, and of slavery as it there existed.''

Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant

171

(16)

Gerald Early

``It is now fast becoming a tradition---if one can use that word to describe a habit about which I still have a certain amount of shamefacedness---for our household to watch the Miss America contest on television every year.''

About Men

187

(4)

Gretel Ehrlich

``Instead of the macho, trigger-happy man our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cowboy is more apt to be convivial, quirky, and softhearted.''

On Becoming a Writer

191

(7)

Ralph Ellison

``Like Huck, we observed, we judged, we imitated and evaded as we could the dullness, corruption, and blindness of `civilization.'''

A Few Words about Breasts: Shaping Up Absurd

198

(8)

Nora Ephron

``Even though I was outwardly a girl and had many of the trappings generally associated with the field of girldom---a girl's name, for example, and dresses, my own telephone, an autograph book---I spent the early years of my adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any point gum it up.''

The Leap

206

(7)

Louise Erdrich

``In the final vignette of their act, they actually would kiss in midair, pausing, almost hovering as they swooped past one another.''

Very Like a Whale

213

(6)

Robert Finch

``But as the crowds continued to grow around the whale's body like flies around carrion, the question seemed to me, and still seems, not so much why did the whale die, as why had we come to see it?''

Jewels

219

(5)

Janet Frame

``How could I have been so at the mercy of one word.''

Petty Theft

224

(3)

Joan Frank

``Police must have been phoned, but I have no recollection of it, nor of being loaded into a squad car or of being fingerprinted or booked.''

The Gift Outright

227

(1)

Robert Frost

``The land was ours before we were the land's.''

38 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police

228

(4)

Martin Gansberg

``For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.''

An Imaginary Correspondence

232

(8)

Rumer Godden

``I have too much good sense to think that Peter Rabbit could ever be magnificent; he is an ordinary, small, brown rabbit.''

The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone

240

(11)

Stephen Jay Gould

``Almost all the authors treat the same topics, usually in the same sequence, and often with illustrations changed only enough to avoid suits for plagiarism.''

The Radio Age 1915-1945

251

(9)

Harvey Green

``The radio brought a new style of singing, termed `crooning,' to Americans, in addition to comic songs, ditties, and country music.''

Death Is a Meadowlark

260

(6)

John Haines

``Beyond the hillcrest not even a housetop showed above the yellow grases. I was alone under the sun in an open field with death, unmistakable, physical death.''

Keeping Things

266

(10)

Donald Hall

``Once my wife heard her name called repeatedly in the barn when no one was there to say it.''

Holding Old Negatives Up to the Light

276

(6)

Patricia Hampl

``...In the act of remembering, the personal environment expands, resonates beyond itself, beyond its `subject,' into the endless and tragic recollection that is history.''

The Fourth Month

282

(3)

Jean Hegland

``I wish I could be a twin in your womb, to know what it is you know. I wish I could hear the sounds and silences that your ears have just begun to hear, could feel the currents of amniotic fluid on your raw skin, and the elastic give of the walls that contain you.''

Runaway

285

(7)

Lillian Hellman

``I had four dollars and two bits, but that wasn't much when you meant it to last forever and when you knew it would not be easy for a fourteen-year-old girl to find work in a city where too many people knew her.''

Hills Like White Elephants

292

(5)

Ernest Hemingway

```Yes,' said the girl. `Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'''

The Urge for an End

297

(12)

Edward Hoagland

``I don't dare keep ammunition in my country house for a small rifle I bought secondhand two decades ago.''

Beside Manners

309

(5)

Andrew Holleran

``And just as the hospital visitor is absorbing the shock of these livid eyes, the sick man says in a furious whisper, `Why did you bring me that dreadful magazine?'''

Sand, Tattoo, and the Golden Gate

314

(7)

James D. Houston

``This was the Sunday we received the news that Japanese aircraft had bombed Pearl Harbor and crippled America's Pacific Fleet.''

Salvation

321

(3)

Langston Hughes

``God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.''

The Spiral

324

(5)

Cynthia Huntington

``Sleeping, we wake to sounds of water. Day and night the ocean mutters like a restless dreamer.''

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

329

(4)

Zora Neale Hurston

``Sometimes, I feel discrimated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?''

The Declarations of Jefferson and of the Congress

333

(6)

Thomas Jefferson

``I will state the form of the declaration as originally reported. The parts struck out by Congress shall be distinguished by a black line drawn under them; & those inserted by them shall be placed in the margin or in a concurrent column.''

Gettysburg: July 1, 1863

339

(2)

Jane Kenyon

``Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard.''

Season of Change and Loss

341

(3)

Jane Kenyon

``My plan is to live like the bears: to turn the compost a few more times, prowl around a little longer and then go to sleep...''

Two Poems by Anna Akhmatova

344

(2)

Jane Kenyon

``Like a white stone in a deep well one memory lies inside me.''

On Seeing England for the First Time

346

(10)

Jamaica Kincaid

``I was being shown these views of England for the first time, for the second time, for the one-hundred-millionth time...''

The Forest in the Seeds

356

(5)

Barbara Kingsolver

``The real Wild Kingdom is as small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds...''

Silence

361

(5)

Maxine Hong Kingston

``It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery.''

Facing It

366

(2)

Yosef Komunyakaa

``My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: no tears.''

On Shaving a Beard

368

(3)

Phillip Lopate

``As I cut away the clumps of darkness, a moon rises out of my face.''

The Stone Horse

371

(10)

Barry Lopez

``I've come upon animals suddenly before, and felt a similar tension, a precipitate heightening of the senses.''

Burying

381

(8)

Thomas Lynch

``Every year I bury one hundred and fifty of my townspeople. Another dozen or two I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.''

The Search for Marvin Gardens

389

(10)

John McPhee

``I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances for I already own Kentucky and Indiana.''

The Unmaking of a Scientist

399

(5)

Nancy Mairs

``For weeks I explored the interior of my rat, which I had opened neatly, like the shutters over a window. He was a homely thing, stiff, his fur yellow and matted from formaldehyde, and because he was male, not very interesting.''

Helping and Hating the Homeless

404

(15)

Peter Marin

``Daily the city eddies around the homeless. The crowds flowing past leave a few feet, a gap. We do not touch the homeless world.''

Quiet Is Freedom

419

(2)

Kenneth Maue

``True quiet isn't so much a lack of something as the presence of the world's wholeness.''

The Way to Rainy Mountain

421

(6)

N. Scott Momaday

``War was their sacred business, and they were among the finest horse. men the world has ever known.''

Coming Home to Books

427

(5)

Kyoko Mori

``We mean so many things by home. Kobe would still be my home it home simply meant the place where we grew up...''

Nobel Lecture

432

(7)

Toni Morrison

``For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.''

From Flannery O'Connor's Letters

439

(8)

Flannery O'Connor

``The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be.''

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

447

(13)

Flannery O'Connor

``...It's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can---by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meannerss,' he said....''

The Total Effect and the Eighth Grade

460

(4)

Flannery O'Connor

``Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday....''

Christmas

464

(6)

Frank O'Connor

``But when I woke on Christmas Morning, Ifelt the season of imagination slipping away from me and the world of reality breaking in. If all Santa Claus could bring me from the North Pole was something I could have bought in Myles's Toy Shop for a couple of pence, he seemed to me to be wasting his time.''

I Stand Here Ironing

470

(8)

Tillie Olsen

``After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was better.''

A Hanging

478

(6)

George Orwell

``It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.''

Politics and the English Language

484

(12)

George Orwell

``But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.''

Shooting an Elephant

496

(7)

George Orwell

``And suddenly I realized I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it...''

Cats

503

(4)

Camille Paglia

``The black cat of Halloween is the lingering shadow of archaic night.''

Christmas Letter

507

(4)

Walther G. Prausnitz

``All my warmest wishes to each of you, for a blessed Christmas and for much happiness in the new year....''

So What?

511

(4)

David Quammen

``And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?''

America: The Multinational Society

515

(5)

Ishmael Reed

``One of the artists told me that his paintings, which included African and Afro-American mythological symbols and imagery, were hanging in the local McDonald's restaurant.''

On Food and Happiness

520

(6)

Charles Simic

``Honestly, what would you rather have? The description of a first kiss, or of stuffed cabbage done to perfection?''

The Grandfather

526

(3)

Gary Soto

``Five years later, another avocado hung on a branch, larger than the first and edible when crushed with a fork into a heated tortilla.''

A Way of Writing

529

(6)

William Stafford

``A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.''

Just Walk On By

535

(4)

Brent Staples

``At dark, shadowy intersections in Chicago, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver---black, white, male, or female---hammering down the door locks.''

I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?

539

(13)

Shelby Steele

``I think the real trouble between the races in America is that the races are not just races but competing power groups---a fact that is easily minimized perhaps because it is so obvious. What is not so obvious is that this is true quite apart from the issue of class.''

The Town Dump

552

(6)

Wallace Stegner

``The bedsprings on which the town's first child was begotten might be there; the skeleton of a boy's pet colt; two or three volumes of Shakespeare....''

A Modest Proposal

558

(8)

Jonathan Swift

``I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.''

Outflight, An Essay

566

(4)

Mary Tallmountain

``Drafts jerk us up, down, and around. Here in the body of the cloud, the arctic chill says we're in Alaska.''

Mother Tongue

570

(6)

Amy Tan

``The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room.''

In the Canon, For All the Wrong Reasons

576

(5)

Amy Tan

``Over the years my editor has received hundreds of permissions requests from publishers of college textbooks and multicultural anthologies, all of them wishing to reprint my work for `educational purposes.'''

Two Kinds

581

(10)

Amy Tan

``We didn't immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple.''

Ceti

591

(4)

Lewis Thomas

``....physicists and astronomers from various countries...are convinced that the odds for the existence of life elsewhere are very high...''

Civil Disobedience

595

(19)

Henry David Thoreau

``How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.''

From The Journals: June 16, 1854

614

(5)

Henry David Thoreau

``If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our people, I feel curious to visit it.''

From The Journals: November 30, 1858

616

(3)

``How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it!''

Which

619

(3)

James Thurber

``The relative pronoun `which' can cause more trouble than any other word, if recklessly used. Foolhardy persons sometimes get lost in which-clauses and are never heard of again.''

History as Mirror

622

(13)

Barbara Tuchman

``Whole families died, leaving empty houses and property a prey to looters. Wolves came down from the mountains to attack plaguestricken villages, crops went unharvested, dikes crumbled, salt water reinvaded and soured the lowlands, the forest crept back, and second growth, with the awful energy of nature unchecked, reconverted cleared land to waste.''

Was the World Made for Man?

635

(5)

Mark Twain

``I seem to be the only scientist and theologian still remaining to be heard from on this important matter of whether the world was made for man or not.''

The Disposable Rocket

640

(4)

John Updike

``From the standpoint of reproduction, the male body is a delivery system, as the female is a mazy device for retention. Once the delivery is made, men feel a faint but distinct falling-off of interest.''

Drugs

644

(3)

Gore Vidal

``It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost.''

The Black Writer and the Southern Experience

647

(6)

Alice Walker

``One reads Faulkner knowing that his `colored' people had to come through `Mr. William's' back door, and one feels uneasy, and finally enraged that Faulkner did not burn the whole house down.''

A Worn Path

653

(8)

Eudora Welty

``Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.''

The Point of the Story

661

(4)

Eudora Welty

``The real dramatic force of a story depends on the strength of the emotion that has set it going.''

Porsche

665

(3)

Bailey White

``Mama and I live in one of those houses where things accumulate. Something can get laid down on a table or in the seat of a broken chair and just stay there forever.''

Once More to the Lake

668

(7)

E. B. White

``Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end....''

If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister

675

(4)

Virginia Woolf

``It is a pernnial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary [Elizabethan] literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.''

The Library Card

679

(9)

Richard Wright

``Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.''

A Rhetorical Index

688

(9)

A Thematic Index

697

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

A Writer's Reader

A Writer's Reader

9780321087485

0321087488

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Write a Review

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

A Writer's Reader

A Writer's Reader

9780321087485

0321087488

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Write a Review

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