Intro to Lit Reading List

I’m teaching a section of Introduction to Literature this semester, and a few friends asked about my syllabus. While I’m not going to bore anyone with such a dry document, I am willing to post the class reading list here, in (more or less) the order we’re discussing the work.

• Matthew Dickman, “Slow Dance”
• Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
• Marie Howe, “What the Living Do”
• Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers”
• Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
• ZZ Packer, “Brownies”
• Kathy Fish, “Shoebox”
• Anton Chekhov, “Oysters”
• Gray Jacobik, “Skirts”
• Denis Johnson, “Emergency”
• Edward P. Jones, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
• Elizabeth Alexander, “Tina Green”
• Mary Ruefle, “The Hand”
• Abby Frucht, “The Empiricist”
• Cynthia Ozick, “A Drugstore In Winter”
• Raymond Carver, “Fever”
• Robert Coover, “The Babysitter”
• Richard Ford, “Rock Springs”
• Haruki Murakami, “The Second Bakery Attack”
• Jamaal May, “The Gun Joke”
• James Salter, “Ahknilo”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “Tell-Tale Heart”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Shirley Jackson, “Pillar of Salt”
• James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
• Lydia Davis, “Jury Duty,” “For Sixty Cents,” & “Traveling with Mother”
• Richard Brautigan, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3”
• Michael Oppenheimer, “Paring Knife”
• William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
• Gary Gildner, “Fingers”
• Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
• Anton Chekhov, “Misery”
• Douglas Glover, “The Poet Fishbein”
• Ron Carlson, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”
• Zadie Smith, “You Are In Paradise”
• Dick Allen, “To a Woman Half a World Away”
• Donald Hall, “White Apples”
• Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain slant of light”
• Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
• William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
• Quim Monzo, “Praise”
• George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson”
• Annie Dillard, “This Is the Life”
• Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”
• Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
• Katherine Anne Porter, “Flowering Judas”
• David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”
• Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”
• Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl”
• Aimee Bender, “The Rememberer”
• Carlos Fuentes, “Chac-Mool”

There are a few other pieces, but they’re part of midterms/finals, and I don’t want anyone snooping around to receive an unfair advantage, so I’m not including them here.