Named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, ZZ Packer has received a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award, Wallace Stegner and Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Whiting Award. Her acclaimed 2003 collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere features eight stories whose subjects range from Girl Scouts to expatriates in Japan. Originally from Chicago, Packer is currently writing a novel set in the post-Civil War period. (55 minutes)

Through close readings of Zora Neale Hurston'sTheir Eyes Were Watching God, students will analyzehow Hurston creates a unique literary voice by combining folklore, folk language, and traditional literary techniques. Students will examine the role that folk groups play in both their own lives and in the novel.

Students study select court transcripts and other primary source materials from the second Scottsboro Boys Trial of 1933, a continuation of the first trial in which two young white women wrongfully accused nine African American teenagers of rape.

One of the most compelling novels of the twentieth century, Beloved by Toni Morrison has been read in classrooms across the country since its publication in 1987. The novel follows Sethe's escape to freedom, the murder of her child, and her difficult psychological journey as she copes with her past as a slave.  As both an historical account of the experiences of slavery and an insightful novel about a supernatural ghost, this text is ideal for upper level high school students and students in AP programs.

Everyone knows that "Star Wars" character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts. After examining how moviemakers communicate the villainy of Darth Vader, students examine a passage from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that describes the villain Voldemort, noting how Rowling communicates details about the character. Students then read novels in small groups, with each group member tracking a character in a reading log. When they finish their novels, students design posters and present details on their novels to the class. After the presentations, students make observations on how authors develop character and write journal entries reflecting on what they learned.

This blog is devoted to providing resources to teachers and students of Arabic. The website is run by an Arabic-English-Russian teacher and translator living in the U.K. This blog aims to share cultural and topical resources with lots of ideas for Arabic lessons or for studying alone. It also contains reviews of online resources and books, details of Arabic-language events, recommendations of novels, films, music, and so forth. The author also occasionally posts information about jobs. The blog is searchable.

Students analyze the elements of a novel in many different genres and then hyperlink these pieces together on student-constructed Websites.

Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is often referred to as William Faulkner's first work of genius. Faulkner's style is characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. This curriculum unit will examine narrative structure and time, narrative voice/point of view, and symbolism throughout The Sound and the Fury.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a novel that engages middle school students in thought-provoking discussion, and provides practice in literary analysis skills. The three lessons in this unit all stress textual evidence to support observations and generalizations uncovering the novel's central character traits, symbols and themes.

Set in the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo, In the Time of the Butterflies fictionalizes historical figures in order to dramatize the Dominican people's heroic efforts to overthrow this dictator's brutal regime. In the following activities, students will examine the actions of the characters in the novel and discuss an all encompassing definition for courage.

This course is designed around analyzing intimate bonds and the permutations of heartbreak. Through the analysis of a set of relations in novels, short stories, poetry, music videos, and live theatre, we will consider the transformative states of the lover’s (un)becoming, for how consciousness is constituted by bonds yet how the lover transcends crisis in the moment of the epiphany that surfaces in love’s very failure; indeed, love itself becomes narcissistically yet optimistically illuminating, even in its oppressive hold.