This semester’s Intro to Lit reading list

Over the past year, my Intro to Lit class has evolved a bit. Here’s what we’re reading this semester (stories, essays, poems, plays):

• Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
• Matthew Dickman, “Slow Dance”
• Marie Howe, “What the Living Do”
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”
• Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
• ZZ Packer, “Brownies”
• Anton Chekhov, “Oysters”
• Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”
• Italo Calvino, “The Distance of the Moon”
• John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
• Edward P. Jones, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
• Elizabeth Alexander, “Tina Green”
• Mary Ruefle, “The Hand”
• Gray Jacobik, “Skirts”
• Alice Munro, “The Jack Randa Hotel”
• Cynthia Ozick, “A Drugstore in Winter”
• Raymond Carver, “Fever”
• Gail Godwin, “Dream Children”
• Dorothy Parker, “A Certain Lady”
• Pinckney Benedict, “The Sutton Pie Safe”
• James Salter, “Ahknilo”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
• Kathy Fish, “Shoebox”
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• William Blake, “The Sick Rose”
• Manuel Gonzales, “The Miniature Wife”
• Haruki Murakami, “The Second Bakery Attack”
• Jamaal May, “The Gun Joke”
• Shirley Jackson, “Pillar of Salt”
• James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
• Michael Oppenheimer, “The Paring Knife”
• David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”
• Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”
• Julio Cortázar, “Continuity of Parks”
• Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”
• Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
• Gary Gilder, “Fingers”
• Randall Jarrell, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fable”
• Donald Hall, “White Apples”
• Peter Covino, “April 18th…”
• Wallace Stevens, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
• William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
• Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death”
• Yazmina Reza, “God of Carnage”
• Ron Carlson, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”
• George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson”
• Mark Twain, “The Cannibalism in the Cars”
• Herman Melville, “Bartleby”
• Joy Castro, “Grip”
• Anton Chekhov, “Lady with the Dog”
• Tomas Q. Morín, “Love Train”
• Lydia Davis, “For Sixty Cents” & “Traveling with Mother”
• Richard Brautigan, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3”
• Amber Sparks, “13 Ways of Destroying a Painting”
• Carlos Fuentes, “Chac-Mool”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

Considering gender, it’s not as balanced as I’d like, but it’s getting there. There are also some stories I’m not listing here, as they’ll be used for our midterm and final. Both of these will be written by women.