Literature for Life, as both its title and content suggests, forges a close relationship between students' reading and life experiences--the texts used are accessible, grounded, relatable, and meaningful. There's enough range to suit instructors of many backgrounds, experiences, and strengths and to encourage instructors to better teaching and students to better learning. Literature for Life is available as a package with Kennedy and Gioia's The Literature Collection: An eText: ISBN-0321904281. Click here to watch a four-minute walkthrough of The Literature Collection: http: //media.pearsoncmg.com/long/kennedy_collection_demo/KC2Ccamproj.html. MyLiteratureLab, a dynamic online tool with engaging multimedia resources for students and time-saving features like auto-graded quizzes and exercises to support instructors, can be packaged with Literature for Life. MyLiteratureLab delivers proven results in helping individual students succeed. It provides engaging experiences that personalize, stimulate, and measure learning for each student. And, it comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students, instructors, and departments achieve their goals.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Mr Gold adroitly and expertly advocates the necessity of reading in our lives. Actually he goes as far as claiming that reading is a biological necessity in the same way as eating is. Reading is thinking, imagining, understanding, feeling and healing. It is an activity that is far from an escape or an avoidance of reality because it provides the reader the necessary relief from the ad hoc reacting and chaos of socialising by taking care of us, leading us and letting us imagine alternative lives through the complex paths of experience and language. In this sense reading truly is a therapeutic experience and Mr Gold gives numerous examples of patients he managed to cure by giving them novels to read because they are an experiential tool for re-seeing and reordering the reader's own confusing experience. Novels take on our confusion, they bear our burdens and leave us to see the larger picture we cannot see because they offer another perspective. Reading being the most powerful and plentiful source of information, it isn't surprising that a vital element for the survival of any totalitarian regime is to take control of what people read because language is power. Authors like Aldus Huxley, George Orwell and above all Ray Bradbury have masterfully illustrated this point in their novels, the latter showing what happens to a civilisation in which television replaces literacy. People may still be able to read but they are what we may call "literary illiterates". No doubt Mr Gold's message is clear: we have to read for the salvation of our spirit.

A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person—and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge—and come to understand its cost. In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

FAIRY TALES AND MYTHS have enriched childhood for centuries. In between “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after” we embark on adventures that seem an eternity away from our everyday lives. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, journey through a treasury of beloved fables and folk tales and discover the wisdom hiding within. In an age that rejects moral absolutes, children’s literature restores the meaning of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal—and helps us see the nature of our world more clearly than we ever have before.