1809-1852

Features analysis of the plays most frequently studied in literature classes. Entries include: introduction providing overview of play; brief biography of playwright; plot summary; discussion of play's principal themes; essays on play's construction; and excerpted critical commentary.

Presents vital information on the most-studied short stories at the high school and early-college levels. Each entry contains author biography, plot summary, characters, themes, style, historical context, critical overview, and criticism.

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Nikolai Gogol.

"In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times"--Provided by publisher.

Gogol is ashamed of his Indian name and when he goes off to Yale, he has it legally changed to Nikhil and throughout his life he feels stricken with guilt and outcast.

Text and illustrations look at the life and work of Louis Braille, creator of the writing system that enables blind people to read.

"With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides-Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others-Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes instead to the places associated with the country's literary masters"--Jacket flap.

The life of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who invented an alphabet enabling the blind to read.

A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.

Louis Braille was only fifteen when he invented a reading system that converted printed words into columns of raised dots. Readers will learn how Braille opened the world of books to the sightless, and nearly two hundred years later, no one has ever improved on his simple, brilliant idea.