* indicates a reading new to this edition

Gloria Anzaldua : How to Tame a Wild Tongue
*Kwame Anthony Appiah : Facts on the Ground
Francis Bacon : Of Studies
Dave Barry : Road Warrior
Roland Barthes : Toys
Lord Chesterfield : Letter to His Son
Judith Ortiz Cofer : Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
K.C. Cole : Calculated Risks
Charles Darwin : Natural Selection
*Joan Didion : On Self-Respect
Annie Dillard : Living Like Weasels
Frederick Douglass : Learning to Read and Write
Brian Doyle : Joyas Voladoras
Gretel Ehrlich : About Men
Ralph Ellison : Living with Music
Richard Feynman : The Value of Science
Benjamin Franklin : Arriving at Perfection
Ellen Goodman : The Company Man
Mary Gordon : More Than Just a Shrine-Ellis Island
William Hazlitt : On the Pleasure of Hating
*Linda Hogan : Dwellings
Michael Hogan : The Colonel
Langston Hughes : Salvation
*Zora Neale Hurston : How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Pico Iyer : Nowhere Man
*Jamaica Kincaid : On Seeing England for the First Time
Martin Luther King Jr. : Letter from Birmingham Jail
*Stephen King : Why We Crave Horror Movies
Maxine Hong Kingston : On Discovery
Abraham Lincoln : The Gettysburg Address
Niccolo Machiavelli : The Morals of the Prince
*Laura Miller : Cat People vs. Dog People
N. Scott Momaday : The Way to Rainy Mountain
Michel de Montaigne : Of Smalls
Nuala O'Faolain : Are You Somebody
George Orwell : Shooting an Elephant
Scott Russell Sanders : Under the Influence
*David Sedaris : Cyclops
* Lee Siegel : The World That Is the Case
Susan Sontag : A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source
Elizabeth Cady Stanton : Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Brent Staples : Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space
Jonathan Swift : A Modest Proposal
Amy Tan : Mother Tongue
Henry David Thoreau : Why I Went to the Woods
Sojourner Truth : Ain't I a Woman
*Alice Walker : Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self
E.B. White : Once More to the Lake
Mary Wollstonecraft : A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Virginia Woolf : The Death of the Moth