Teachers have struggled for years to balance the competing demands of American Literature and AP English Language. Now, the team that brought you the bestselling Language of Composition is here to help. Conversations in American Literature: Language ∙ Rhetoric ∙ Culture is a new kind of American Literature anthology—putting nonfiction on equal footing with the traditional fiction and poetry, and emphasizing the skills of rhetoric, close reading, argument, and synthesis. To spark critical thinking, the book includes TalkBack pairings and synthesis Conversations that let students explore how issues and texts from the past continue to impact the present. Whether you’re teaching AP English Language, or gearing up for Common Core, Conversations in American Literature will help you revolutionize the way American literature is taught.

A book that’s built for you and your students. Flexible and innovative, American Literature & Rhetoric provides everything you need to teach your course. Combining reading and writing instruction to build essential skills in its four opening chapters and a unique anthology you need to keep students engaged in Chapters 5-10, this book makes it easy to teach chronologically, thematically, or by genre.

In joining the rich conversations that have enlivened American culture for centuries, Invisible Conversations seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the United States.

Largely ignored by mainstream audiences for the first thirty years of her career, Anais Nin (1903-1977) finally came into her own with the publication of the first part of her diary in 1966. Thereafter she was catapulted into fame. Throughout the late sixties and the seventies she attracted a host of devoted and admiring readers in the counter culture, who were magnetized by her personal liberation and openness. For a woman to make such probing exploration of the intimate recesses of her psyche made her a cult figure with a large and lasting readership. Born in France, Anais Nin lived much of her life in America. Her liaison with Henry Miller and his wife June, documented in her explicitly detailed diaries, became the subject of a major film of the nineties. Her forthright books, her diaries that continue to be published in a steady flow, and her charismatic charm made her the subject of many candid interviews, such as those collected here. Eight included in this volume are printed for the first time. Many others were originally published in magazines that are now defunct. Nin elaborates on subjects only touched upon in the diaries, and she speaks also of her role in the women's movement and of her philosophies on art, writing, and individual growth.

Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated offers a judicious selection of interviews spanning the writing career of Jim Harrison (1937–2016) from its beginnings in the 1960s to the last interview he gave weeks before his death in March 2016. Harrison labeled himself and lived as a “quadra-schizoid” writer. He worked in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, and he published more than forty books that attracted an international following. These interviews supply a lively narrative of his progress as a major contemporary American author. This collection showcases Harrison's pet peeves, his candor and humility, his sense of humor, and his patience. He does not shy from his authorial obsessions, especially his efforts to hone the novella, for which he is considered a contemporary master, or the frequency with which he defied polite narrative conventions and created memorable, resolute female characters. Each conversation attests to the depth and range of Harrison’s considerable intellectual and political preoccupations, his fierce social and ecological conscience, his aesthetic beliefs, and his stylistic orientations in poetry and prose.

Literary journalist, ""lowly social historian,"" ""chronicler of his times,"" and ""champion of realism"" are among the many epithets heaped upon Tom Wolfe by himself and his myriad admirers and critics. In this collection of interviews spanning his richly productive career, Wolfe is seen as a writer imitating no one and riding the crest of each latest wave in contemporary America. For more than a quarter of a century he has been the vivid and varied chronicler of our time--from the Californian car customizers and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters of the sixties to the ambition-driven inhabitants of New York City in the eighties. His hybrid of reporting and fiction-writing has received perhaps more applause than any other literary journalism, and his first major work of fiction, Bonfire of the Vanities, rested at the top of the bestseller lists for more than a year. Here is Tom Wolfe talking--about the subjects of his eight books, about the writers he admires, about the discipline of writing, about his politics and his disposition to satire and parody. As he explains his attempt ""to show the world 'life in our times,'"" this collection of delightfully witty and informative interviews reveals the insights and the intellect of one of America's brightest and most appealing authors.

Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant scholarly attention. Erickson’s obscurity comes in part from the difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history, time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America’s triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception—and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson’s vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers’ understanding of how Erickson’s books work—and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.