50 Essays by Samuel Cohen - Sixth Edition, 2020 from Macmillan Student Store

50 Essays

A Portable AnthologySixth Edition ©2020 Samuel Cohen

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology is a bestselling value-priced reader because its virtues don't stop at the price. The book’s carefully chosen selections engage students and include both classic essays and high-interest, contemporary readings. The editorial apparatus is flexible and unobtrus...
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ISBN:9781319434632

50 Essays by Samuel Cohen - Sixth Edition, 2020 from Macmillan Student Store

Portable, affordable, and highly teachable

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology is a bestselling value-priced reader because its virtues don't stop at the price. The book’s carefully chosen selections engage students and include both classic essays and high-interest, contemporary readings. The editorial apparatus is flexible and unobtrusive enough to support a variety of approaches to teaching composition. The sixth edition features new voices on culturally relevant topics as well as sentence guides that help students develop an academic writing voice with templates for a variety of composing situations.

Features


Portable and affordable. With a carefully curated selection of readings at an incredibly low price, 50 Essays is less than half the cost of most other readers.

Highly teachable. 50 Essays offers models of good writing with selections that are proven to be effective in the classroom. Classic selections by authors such as Frederick Douglass, Plato, and Virginia Woolf expose students to time-tested writing. Contemporary writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jenine Holmes, and culturally diverse authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rahawa Haile and Hanya Yanigahara, introduce alternative perspectives and current voices.

A flexible collection that can be adapted to suit a variety of classroom needs. The alphabetical-by-author arrangement of the readings is supplemented by six alternative tables of contents that organize the selections by rhetorical mode, theme, writing purpose, chronological order, Lexile level, and teaching pairs and clusters.

Practical apparatus that meets the needs of writing instructors. The editorial material moves students from critical reading to thoughtful writing and revising.

  • An introduction for students discusses the relationship among critical thinking, reading, and writing.
  • Headnotes precede each reading, providing biographical and contextual background.
  • Five kinds of questions follow each selection to help students understand, analyze, connect with, and respond to what they read.
  • A glossary of writing terms provides definitions of important rhetorical concepts, including examples drawn from essays in the anthology.
  • New Sentence Guides for Academic Writers help students as they develop their skills as writers both in the classroom and beyond.

New to This Edition


19 new essays include current writers on contemporary, relevant topics as well as canonical writers on enduring topics, and invite students to examine the past and the present while providing excellent models of effective writing.  New essays include the following:

  • Rahawa Haile’s “Going It Alone” examines race relations and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
  • Matthew J. X. Malady’s “The Ghosts in Our Machines” explores grief in the age of the Internet.
  • Ai Weiwei’s “The refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. It’s about us” probes attitudes towards displaced persons.
  • Tommy Orange’s “Indian Heads” looks at the history of Native Americans as represented on everyday objects such as coins.

New Sentence Guides for Academic Writers help students develop an academic writing voice by providing them with templates to follow in a variety of composing situations, such as “Presenting direct quotations” and “Presenting and countering objections to your argument.”

Help for grammar, style, punctuation, and more is available when you package 50 Essays with any pocket-sized handbook. Choose EasyWriter, A Pocket Style Manual, or In Conversation--for just $10 more (net). Contact your representative for ISBNs.

A new Lexile Level Table of Contents helps both instructors and students determine the reading levels of the essays in the book.


“50 Essays is a comprehensive volume of provocative and timely essays, and this text encourages student discussion, interaction, and lively debate.”

— Elizabeth Keefe, Gateway Community College

“The particular collection of authors, perspectives, and voices that 50 Essays brings together makes this an essential text for any English Composition course.”

 — Robert DeFrance, Long Beach City College

“50 Essays has been a staple for our 100-level composition course for over seven years. It allows instructors to individualize their course, while providing appropriate and essential readings for the first-year college student.”

 — Sarah Kirk, University of Alaska Anchorage

Digital Options

Table of Contents

            
Preface for Instructors 
Alternative Tables of Contents
     By Rhetorical Mode 
     By Purpose 
     By Theme 
     By Clusters and Paired Readings 
     By Chronological Order 
     By Lexile Level 
Sentence Guides 
MLA Documentation Guide 
Introduction for Students: Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process 

*Maya Angelou, Graduation
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue 
Barbara Lazear Ascher, On Compassion 
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son 
William F. Buckley, jr., Why Don’t We Complain? 
*Danny Chau, The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken 
*Sandra Cisneros, Only Daughter 
*Eli Claire, Clearcut: Explaining the Distance 
Ta-​Nehisi Coates, The Paranoid Style of American Policing 
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María 
Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook 
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write 
Barbara Ehrenreich, Serving in Florida 
Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving 
Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie 
Jen Gann, Wrongful Birth 
Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted 
*Jonathan Gold, What Is a Burrito? A Primer 
*Rahawa Haile, Going It Alone 
*Jenine Holmes, When Pink Ballet Slippers Won’t Do 
Langston Hughes, Salvation 
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me 
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence 
Jamaica Kincaid, The Ugly Tourist 
Stephen King, Reading to Write 
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Our Vanishing Night 
Audre Lorde, The Fourth of July 
Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple 
*Matthew J. X. Malady, The Ghosts in Our Machines 
Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America 
*Tommy Orange, Indian Heads 
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant 
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave 
Mike Rose, “I Just Wanna Be Average” 
*Carl Sagan, Does Truth Matter? 
*Maria Michela Sassi, The Sea Was Never Blue 
*David Sedaris, I Like Guys 
Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space 
*Gloria Steinem, Sex, Lies & Advertisting 
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal 
Amy Tan, Mother Tongue 
henry david thoreau, Civil Disobedience 
*Calvin Trillin, Last Days of the Rickshaw 
*Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal 
*Ai Weiwei, The refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. It’s about us. 
E.B.White, Once More to the Lake 
*Walt Whitman, Slang in America 
Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women 
*Hanya Yanigahara, A Pet Tortoise Who Will Outlive Us All 
Dave Zirin, Pre-​Game 
 
Glossary of Writing Terms 
Index of Authors and Titles

Samuel Cohen

Samuel Cohen (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with James Peacock) of The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on The Only Band that Matters, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is author of 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.