The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays From a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize Book

This collection was dry, dry, dry. Not recommended if you prefer the type of creative nonfiction featured in magazines like the New Yorker, Georgia Review, etc.

This book has great writing and poetry, but also explains how to analyze and also gives tips for writing. I would recommend that anyone who is interested in learning how to analyze writing, either someone else's or your own, or in picking up tips on how to write better take a serious look at this book. To give an idea of who is included and what info you can expect I'm going to create a list below. I'm not going to include every single writer and entry in my list of included works. I'm also going to break it down into the book sections (I have the book in front of me). It's gonna be a bit long, but I want to give an idea of who is included here. The sections are broken down even more, but I'm leaving those out in the interest of making this as short as possible.

FICTION
1 Reading a Story
Fable and Tale: W. Sommerset Maugham, Brothers Grimm
Short Story: John Updike
2 Point of View: Faulkner, Poe, Carver, Mansfield
3 Character: Alice Walker, Isaac Bashevis Singer
4 Setting: Kate Chopin, Jack London, Amy Tan
5 Tone and Style: Hemingway, Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges
6 Theme: Vonnegut, Hawthorne, Stephen Crane
7 Symbol: Steinbeck, Ursula Le Guin
8 (instructional stuff on evaluating a story)
9 Reading Long Stories and Novels: James Baldwin, Kafka
10 A Writer in Depth: Flannery O'Connor
11 Stories for Further Reading: Chinua Achebe "Civil Peace",
Willa Cather "Paul's Case", Langston Hughes "On the Road",
Jamacia Kincaid "Girl", Tim O'Brien "The Things They
Carried", Eudora Welty "A Visit of Charity"

POETRY
12 Reading a Poem: Yeats, Adrienne Rich, Frost, Robert
Browning
13 Listening to a Voice: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
William Wordsworth, Louise Gluck, Thomas Hardy, W.H.
Auden, Richard Lovelace, Wilfred Owen
14 Words: Robert Graves, William Carlos Williams, Longfellow,
Emma Lee Warrior, Josephine Mills, e.e. cummings, Lewis
Carroll
15 Saying and Suggesting: William Blake, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Alfred Lord Tennyson
16 Imagery: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop
17 Figures of Speech: Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Margaret
Atwood
18 Song: Run D.M.C., Paul Simon, Dudley Randall, Bessie
Smith, John Lennon
19 Sound: Alexander Pope, Updike, A.E. Housman, William
Blake, Michael Stillman
20 Rhythm: Gwendolyn Brooks, Ben Jonson, Dorothy Parker,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman
21 Closed Form: John Keats, Shakespeare, Wendy Cope, Dylan
Thomas
22 Open Form: Wallace Stevens, Dorthi Charles, Lucille
Clifton
23 Symbol: Matthew 13:24-30, Sara Teasdale, Ted Kooser
24 Myth and Narrative: Louise Bogan, Yeats, Anne Sexton
25 Poetry and Perosnal Idendity: Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove,
Donald Justice, Judith Ortiz Cofer
26 Evaluating a Poem: Stephen Tropp, Rod McKuen, Percy
Bysshe Shelly, Emma Lazarus
27 (info on what is poetry)
28 Two Poets in Depth: Emily DIckinson, Langston Hughes
29 Poems for Further Reading: Emily Bronte, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Allen
Ginsberg, Stephen Shu-ning Liu, John Milton, Sir Thomas
Wyatt
30 (info on lives of poets)

DRAMA
31 Reading a Play: Susan Glaspell, Garrison Keillor
32 The Theater of Sophocles Oedipus the King
33 The Theater of Shakespeare: Othello
34 The Modern Theater: Henrik Ibsen, Milcha Sanchez-Scott
35 (info on evaluating a play)
36 Plays for Further Reading: Arthur Miller, Tennessee
Williams

WRITING
37 Writing about literature
38 Writing about a story
39 Writing about a poem
40 Writing about a play
41 Writing and researching on the computer
42 Critical approaches to Literature