Helen Plum Library

"Jon Scieszka's Guys Read anthology series for tweens turns to nonfiction in its fifth volume, True Stories. The fifth installment in the Guys Read Library of Great Reading features ten stories that are 100% amazing, 100% adventurous, 100% unbelievable--and 100% true. A star-studded group of award-winning nonfiction authors and journalists provides something for every reader, all aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Compiled and edited by...

No American writer of the 19th century was more universally enjoyed and admired than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over 25 years, Poems and Other Writings offers a full-scale literary portrait of America's greatest popular poet. Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the Forest Primeval, Hiawatha by the...

Provides a critical introduction to the American diary literature of late nineteenth-century.

For the past year, a group of high school students met at a publishing house in San Francisco every Monday night to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together, and under the guidance of guest editor Adam Johnson, these high schoolers selected the contents of The Best American Nonrequired Reading...

Watkins (an author, he was an editor at the New York Times Book Review) has compiled an anthology of Black humor that, perhaps inadvertently, reveals much about changes in American as well as Black society. The lengthy excerpts are printed with little prefatory material, though a historical introduction is provided for each chapter. An appendix contains a list of authors with short biographies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland,...

In this anthology of memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O'Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks