Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street (Bloom's Guides)
In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros draws on her own experience as a Hispanic woman writer facing obstacles in a patriarchal community resistant to change. Published in 1984 to instantaneous acclaim, the book is made up of lyrical passages, interconnected vignettes, and meditations and observations that resemble prose poems. Cisneros's structurally and thematically bold work explores the often violent coming of age of a young Mexican-American woman.
Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale (Bloom's Guides)
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Bloom's Guides collection, presents concise critical excerpts from The Handmaid's Tale to provide a scholarly overview of the work. This comprehensive study guide also features "The Story Behind the Story," which details the conditions under which The Handmaid's Tale was written. This title also includes a short biography on Margaret Atwood and a descriptive list of characters.
The 13th supplement to the series contains biographies and critical analysis of the works of 18 mainly contemporary writers and poets, including Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Stephen Dobyns, Tillie Olsen, Luis Omar Salinas, Terry McMillan, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Each entry offers a critical review of a selection of the writer's work, a biography, discussion of the writer's career, and selected bibliography. An index for the whole series is included. This reference is useful to high school and undergraduate students.
This supplement brings together a wide range of articles on American writers, most of them contemporary, although a couple of them reach back to neglected, but important, writers from the literary past. Writers from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds have contributed a great deal to contemporary literature, and several of the strongest among writers of fiction are considered in this volume.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Bloom's Guides)
In a single, engaging volume, The Great Gatsby presents a helpful literary guide to one of America’s most prized classic novels. First published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby captured the spirit of the Jazz Age and examined the American obsession with love, wealth, material objects, and class. Considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, Fitzgerald’s famous work remains relevant for its observations on the pursuit of the American dream.
