Table of Contents
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Francis Bacon, Of Studies
James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is
Dave Barry, Road Warrior
Roland Barthes, Toys
Sven Birkerts, Into the Electronic Millennium
Judy Brady, I Want a Wife
G. K. Chesterton, The Fallacy of Success
Judith Oriz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
Bernard Cooper, Labyrinthine
Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels
Mark Doty, Souls on Ice
Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras
Gretel Ehrlich, About Men
Ralph Ellison, Living with Music
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Ellen Goodman, The Company Man
Michael Hogan, The Colonel
Barbara Holland, Naps
Langston Hughes, Salvation
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Stephen King, Why We Crave Horror Movies
Barbara Kingsolver, Stone Soup
Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery
August Kleinzahler, The Dog, The Family: A Household Tale
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
John McPhee, Silk Parachute
Herman Melville, The Advocate
Laura Miller, Cat People vs. Dog People
Horace Miner, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Michelle de Montaigne, Of Smells
George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Scott Russell Sanders, The Men We Carry In Our Minds
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
Lee Siegel, The World Is All That Is the Case
Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination
Susan Sontag, A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Lewis Thomas, Crickets, Cats, Bats, & Chaos
Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods
Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?
Mark Twain, Reading the Mississippi River
Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
