The material is presented in a newly revised, easier to study format and inlcudes MLA's latest guidelines. Conversations between Dana Gioia and celebrated fiction writer Amy Tan, current U. S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, and contemporary playwright David Ives, offer students an insider's look into the importance of reading to three contemporary writers. A Latin American Writers casebook is new to Fiction and collects some of the finest authors from the region including Octavia Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ines Arendondo. A casebook on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is now featured as part of the Three Stories In-depth chapter. Many new writers have been added including Naguib Mahfouz, Virginia Woolf, Sherman Alexie, Mary Oliver, Bettie Sellers, and Anne Deavere Smith. As always, editors X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia bring personal warmth and a human perspective to the Eleventh Edition of this comprehensive anthology.