A lilting kitty mystery combines with rain-centered facts to create an utterly charming fiction/nonfiction picture book. As kids are invited on the search for Kitty, they'll also discover what different animals do to enjoy, or avoid, a rainy day. Harriet Ziefert's rhyming couplets pair beautifully with Brigette Barrager's lush art to make a combination that is sure to please young readers and adults alike. What makes a duck waterproof? Where do butterflies hang out to stay dry? What serves as a built-in umbrella for a squirrel? Created especially for younger readers, here's a unique title that's part mystery, part science, and all curiosity-inspiring fun!

A Study Guide for Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

With an Overview by Paul Smith and a Checklist to Hemingway Criticism, 1975–1990 New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is an all-new sequel to Benson’s highly acclaimed 1975 book, which provided the first comprehensive anthology of criticism of Ernest Hemingway’s masterful short stories. Since that time the availability of Hemingway’s papers, coupled with new critical and theoretical approaches, has enlivened and enlarged the field of American literary studies. This companion volume reflects current scholarship and draws together essays that were either published during the past decade or written for this collection. The contributors interpret a variety of individual stories from a number of different critical points of view—from a Lacanian reading of Hemingway’s “After the Storm” to a semiotic analysis of “A Very Short Story” to an historical-biographical analysis of “Old Man at the Bridge.” In identifying the short story as one of Hemingway’s principal thematic and technical tools, this volume reaffirms a focus on the short story as Hemingway’s best work. An overview essay covers Hemingway criticism published since the last volume, and the bibliographical checklist to Hemingway short fiction criticism, which covers 1975 to mid-1989, has doubled in size. Contributors. Debra A. Moddelmog, Ben Stotzfus, Robert Scholes, Hubert Zapf, Susan F. Beegel, Nina Baym, William Braasch Watson, Kenneth Lynn, Gerry Brenner, Steven K. Hoffman, E. R. Hagemann, Robert W. Lewis, Wayne Kvam, George Monteiro, Scott Donaldson, Bernard Oldsey, Warren Bennett, Kenneth G. Johnston, Richard McCann, Robert P. Weeks, Amberys R. Whittle, Pamela Smiley, Jeffrey Meyers, Robert E. Fleming, David R. Johnson, Howard L. Hannum, Larry Edgerton, William Adair, Alice Hall Petry, Lawrence H. Martin Jr., Paul Smith

"In 1943 Ernest Hemingway, living in Cuba with his third wife and eleven cats, wrote to his first wife: One cat just leads to another ... The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time ... He always too great pleasure in writing to his family about his cats and how they were getting along. Family and pets played an important role in Hemingway's life, revealing a softer side to his character than is usually portrayed by the macho image of the hunter and fisherman. His pets were mostly cats--the number at Finca Vigia, his Cuban home, at one time swelling to fifty-seven. He called the cats "purr factories" and "love sponges" who soaked up love in return for comfort and companionship"--Dust jacket cover.

'Janiform Novels' and Other Literary Essays gathers 25 essays by Cedric Watts, MA, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University. Previously published in a diversity of magazines and books, these conveniently-gathered literary discussions deal with such authors as Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Defoe, Richardson, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Conrad, Hemingway, Graham Greene, William Golding, Samuel Beckett and Chinua Achebe. Topics include covert plotting, the conceit of the conceit, the fallacies of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory, delayed decoding, Shakespeare's scepticism, Conrad's opposition to racism and imperialism, Hemingway's profoundly ambiguous style, and Lévi-Strauss's ludicrous naivety. Cedric Watts's critical writings have been described as 'fearless', 'perceptive', 'provocative', 'incisive' and 'entertaining' (Neil Sinyard, Graham Greene Newsletter).

"In Hemingway's Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction, John Beall examines in close detail two of the author's vignettes from the first version of In Our Time and ten of his short stories, with an extensive focus on manuscripts and typescripts, as part of a broader examination of how Ernest Hemingway crafted his distinctive prose through a rigorous process of revision. The first three chapters discuss the influence of Hemingway's three most important modernist mentors: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The first chapter focuses on Pound's influence as the editor of the Inquest Series, of which Hemingway's in our time was the final publication. The second chapter examines the affinities between Joyce's "The Sisters" and Hemingway's "Indian Camp." In particular, Beall develops the case for Joyce's influence on Hemingway's decision to revise the story to maintain the reader's focus on young Nick Adams's point of view in his first encounter with death. Chapter three explores Hemingway's revisions of "Cat in the Rain" as reflecting the influence of Stein's novellas and sketches, as well as that of Joyce's stories and novels. The remaining chapters delve into the artistry of Hemingway's extensive revisions in later masterpieces from "Big Two-Hearted River" to "Fathers and Sons." Beall's discussion of "Big Two-Hearted River" shows that Hemingway's revisions were not simply cuts and omissions, but included several paragraphs that he added to slow down the narrative and represent Nick Adams's careful observations of a kingfisher and trout as he watched their shadows on the river. The chapter on "The Battler" and "The Killers" explores the extent to which Hemingway's revisions brought racial conflicts to the forefront of each story and portrayed Bugs and Sam as guides for Nick Adams. A subsequent reading of the story "Now I Lay Me" shows that, in rewriting the story, Hemingway developed his portrait of Nick Adams as a writer making up imaginary rivers to cope with the traumas of childhood and war. A chapter on "A Way You'll Never Be" focuses on how Hemingway's revisions developed crucial story elements-including Nick's interior monologues, manic lecture about grasshoppers, and wacky sense of humor-that showed the character restoring a sense of emotional balance despite his memories of being wounded in World War I. Subsequent chapters on "Fathers and Sons," "Indian Camp," "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," and the concluding chapter, in part focused on drafts of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," offer new discussions of the author's process of revision based on his manuscripts and typescripts published in the Hemingway Library Edition. In the end, by drawing attention to the meticulous edits, additions, and deletions that helped shape these texts, Beall reveals how extensively and richly Hemingway revised his drafts while composing some of his most powerful short fiction. Hemingway's Art of Revision gives a detailed view of a great prose stylist at work"--