Washoe County Library System

Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life. The sorrows of William Stoner are tempered, somehow, by the demands of the daily routine. His own ordinary...

This 40-question practice set will help you improve your ability to read and understand literary writing. It includes three literary passages and a poem, instant scoring, and detailed answer explanations.

"Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the...

"It's no secret that millions of American teenagers, caught up in social media, television, movies, and games, don't read seriously-they associate sustained reading with duty or work, not with pleasure. This indifference has become a grievous loss to our standing as a great nation--and a personal loss, too, for millions of teenagers who may turn into adults with limited understanding of themselves and the world. Can teenagers be turned on to serious...

"A series of talks Mario Vargas Llosa gave at Princeton in a class he cotaught with Rubaen Gallo, covering the history of the novel, journalism, terrorism, and all of Vargas Llosa's best-known books"-- "A series of conversations held at Princeton University between the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa and Rubén Gallo. Princeton University, 2015. For one semester, Mario Vargas Llosa taught a course on literature and politics with Rubén Gallo....