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The Odyssey Literary Analysis

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How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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Literature Subject Guide

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• Find Books and eBooks
• Find Videos
• Citation Resources
• Literary Analysis
• Lit Course Guides

Getting Started

Whats and Whys of Literary Analysis

This brief TED-Ed video discusses the power of literature to alter perspectives and develop critical thinking.

This short TED-Ed video frames literary analysis through the basis of insight and complexity.

• What is Fiction as a Genre of Writing and Where did it Come From? What is Analysis? This chapter from An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction highlights the importance of fiction in society and gives a brief overview of literary analysis.
• What Is Literature? The View from the Surface This introductory chapter to Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing informs readers about the literary canon, popular literature, and the importance of reading literature in a critical manner.

Literary Terminology

• The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms An extensive and accessible list of literary terms. OSU's guide offers short written and video lessons for an impressive amount of terminology for literary analysis. Their guide includes lessons in Spanish and English as well as closed captions for their videos.
• What is Theme and How do we Analyze its Development? This chapter from An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction emphasizes the difference between theme and topic. It also discusses literary elements that can lead to understanding the theme of a text.
• Key Components of Short Stories This chapter from Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing by MTC English Department professor, Dr. Rozier, reviews the major elements of a short story.

Practicing Analysis

• Practicing Close Reading This handout goes over the process of close reading step-by-step, beginning with rhetorical situation and ending with creating an argument.

Writing About Literature

• The Literary Analysis Essay This chapter from Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking, and Communication introduces different types of literary analysis arguments. The author breaks down the writing process for a literary analysis and provides different organizational methods.
• Writing a Literary Essay: Moving from Surface to Subtext This chapter from Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing walks students through the writing process of a literary analysis essay from joining an existing conversation to drafting. This chapter also contains various sample essays.

Additional Resources

• Creating Literary Analysis Helpful for 200-level classes, this textbook discusses different historical, social, and methodological literary theories and their applications
• Introduction to Literature An all-encompassing textbook for reading, analyzing, and writing about literature.
• An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction Specifically for the analysis of fiction, this book does an excellent job at describing basic textual analysis and the primary components of fiction as well as writing tips.
• Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing This textbook includes an introduction to literature and breaks down the major literary genres with a history and sample analysis for each genre.
• The Worry Free Writer With a broader purpose of general analysis, this textbook includes advertisement analysis and creative non-fiction as genres for study.
• Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking, and Communication A useful textbook for discussing how rhetoric plays a role in writing about literature.
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Literary Analysis Essay #2 - VV (Final)

Literary Analysis Essay

Literary Analysis Essay Writing

Last updated on: May 21, 2023

Literary Analysis Essay - Ultimate Guide By Professionals

By: Cordon J.

Reviewed By: Rylee W.

Published on: Dec 3, 2019

A literary analysis essay specifically examines and evaluates a piece of literature or a literary work. It also understands and explains the links between the small parts to their whole information.

It is important for students to understand the meaning and the true essence of literature to write a literary essay.

One of the most difficult assignments for students is writing a literary analysis essay. It can be hard to come up with an original idea or find enough material to write about. You might think you need years of experience in order to create a good paper, but that's not true.

This blog post will show you how easy it can be when you follow the steps given here.Writing such an essay involves the breakdown of a book into small parts and understanding each part separately. It seems easy, right?

Trust us, it is not as hard as good book reports but it may also not be extremely easy. You will have to take into account different approaches and explain them in relation with the chosen literary work.

It is a common high school and college assignment and you can learn everything in this blog.

Continue reading for some useful tips with an example to write a literary analysis essay that will be on point. You can also explore our detailed article on writing an analytical essay .

On this Page

What is a Literary Analysis Essay?

A literary analysis essay is an important kind of essay that focuses on the detailed analysis of the work of literature.

The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to explain why the author has used a specific theme for his work. Or examine the characters, themes, literary devices , figurative language, and settings in the story.

This type of essay encourages students to think about how the book or the short story has been written. And why the author has created this work.

The method used in the literary analysis essay differs from other types of essays. It primarily focuses on the type of work and literature that is being analyzed.

Mostly, you will be going to break down the work into various parts. In order to develop a better understanding of the idea being discussed, each part will be discussed separately.

The essay should explain the choices of the author and point of view along with your answers and personal analysis.

How To Write A Literary Analysis Essay

So how to start a literary analysis essay? The answer to this question is quite simple.

The following sections are required to write an effective literary analysis essay. By following the guidelines given in the following sections, you will be able to craft a winning literary analysis essay.

Introduction

The aim of the introduction is to establish a context for readers. You have to give a brief on the background of the selected topic.

It should contain the name of the author of the literary work along with its title. The introduction should be effective enough to grab the reader’s attention.

In the body section, you have to retell the story that the writer has narrated. It is a good idea to create a summary as it is one of the important tips of literary analysis.

Other than that, you are required to develop ideas and disclose the observed information related to the issue. The ideal length of the body section is around 1000 words.

To write the body section, your observation should be based on evidence and your own style of writing.

It would be great if the body of your essay is divided into three paragraphs. Make a strong argument with facts related to the thesis statement in all of the paragraphs in the body section.

Start writing each paragraph with a topic sentence and use transition words when moving to the next paragraph.

Summarize the important points of your literary analysis essay in this section. It is important to compose a short and strong conclusion to help you make a final impression of your essay.

Pay attention that this section does not contain any new information. It should provide a sense of completion by restating the main idea with a short description of your arguments. End the conclusion with your supporting details.

You have to explain why the book is important. Also, elaborate on the means that the authors used to convey her/his opinion regarding the issue.

For further understanding, here is a downloadable literary analysis essay outline. This outline will help you structure and format your essay properly and earn an A easily.

DOWNLOADABLE LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY OUTLINE (PDF)

Types of Literary Analysis Essay

• Close reading - This method involves attentive reading and detailed analysis. No need for a lot of knowledge and inspiration to write an essay that shows your creative skills.
• Theoretical - In this type, you will rely on theories related to the selected topic.
• Historical - This type of essay concerns the discipline of history. Sometimes historical analysis is required to explain events in detail.
• Applied - This type involves analysis of a specific issue from a practical perspective.
• Comparative - This type of writing is based on when two or more alternatives are compared

Examples of Literary Analysis Essay

Examples are great to understand any concept, especially if it is related to writing. Below are some great literary analysis essay examples that showcase how this type of essay is written.

A ROSE FOR EMILY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE GREAT GATSBY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

If you do not have experience in writing essays, this will be a very chaotic process for you. In that case, it is very important for you to conduct good research on the topic before writing.

There are two important points that you should keep in mind when writing a literary analysis essay.

First, remember that it is very important to select a topic in which you are interested. Choose something that really inspires you. This will help you to catch the attention of a reader.

The selected topic should reflect the main idea of writing. In addition to that, it should also express your point of view as well.

Another important thing is to draft a good outline for your literary analysis essay. It will help you to define a central point and division of this into parts for further discussion.

Literary Analysis Essay Topics

Literary analysis essays are mostly based on artistic works like books, movies, paintings, and other forms of art. However, generally, students choose novels and books to write their literary essays.

Some cool, fresh, and good topics and ideas are listed below:

• Role of the Three Witches in flaming Macbeth’s ambition.
• Analyze the themes of the Play Antigone,
• Discuss Ajax as a tragic hero.
• The Judgement of Paris: Analyze the Reasons and their Consequences.
• Oedipus Rex: A Doomed Son or a Conqueror?
• Describe the Oedipus complex and Electra complex in relation to their respective myths.
• Betrayal is a common theme of Shakespearean tragedies. Discuss
• Identify and analyze the traits of history in T.S Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’.
• Analyze the theme of identity crisis in The Great Gatsby.
• Analyze the writing style of Emily Dickinson.

If you are still in doubt then there is nothing bad in getting professional writers’ help.

We at 5StarEssays.com can help you get a custom paper as per your specified requirements with our do essay for me service.

Our essay writers will help you write outstanding literary essays or any other type of essay. Such as compare and contrast essays, descriptive essays, rhetorical essays. We cover all of these.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What should a literary analysis essay include.

A good literary analysis essay must include a proper and in-depth explanation of your ideas. They must be backed with examples and evidence from the text. Textual evidence includes summaries, paraphrased text, original work details, and direct quotes.

What are the 4 components of literary analysis?

Here are the 4 essential parts of a literary analysis essay;

No literary work is explained properly without discussing and explaining these 4 things.

How do you start a literary analysis essay?

Start your literary analysis essay with the name of the work and the title. Hook your readers by introducing the main ideas that you will discuss in your essay and engage them from the start.

How do you do a literary analysis?

In a literary analysis essay, you study the text closely, understand and interpret its meanings. And try to find out the reasons behind why the author has used certain symbols, themes, and objects in the work.

Why is literary analysis important?

It encourages the students to think beyond their existing knowledge, experiences, and belief and build empathy. This helps in improving the writing skills also.

What is the fundamental characteristic of a literary analysis essay?

Interpretation is the fundamental and important feature of a literary analysis essay. The essay is based on how well the writer explains and interprets the work.

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Cordon. is a published author and writing specialist. He has worked in the publishing industry for many years, providing writing services and digital content. His own writing career began with a focus on literature and linguistics, which he continues to pursue. Cordon is an engaging and professional individual, always looking to help others achieve their goals.

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The Other Time a Grown Man Threatened My Life

An excerpt from YOU ARE THE SNAKE by Juliet Escoria, recommended by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Introduction by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Juliet Escoria has built her career writing semi-autobiographical accounts of unlikeable, edgy women—party girls who struggle with addiction and mental health. Her characters are often described as subverting expectations, but I’ve always felt this was a quick and lazy take, especially (and unfortunately) cliché for American women short story writers working in a form epistemologically defined by male masters. Escoria’s writing, her women, have never wanted our pity. In You Are the Snake , her second short story collection, Escoria confronts us. Sylvia Plath wrote, “there is a charge for the eyeing of my scars.” The women in You Are the Snake don’t want applause for what they’re capable of, despite their sex. Every story is a power play, fucking with us and the form.

There are other power plays in You Are the Snake : a girl smacks her new stepmother in the face, a woman slips out of the house and gussies up at the bar while the rest of her family is sleeping, and a nun still remembers stealing back an eraser that was stolen from her as a child. I expect people will describe these stories as women misbehaving, but these women deserve more. This is a collection from a writer following her instincts: exploring isolation, loneliness, the beauty of violence, and the gifts of love—all while writing with vulnerability. 

Later in “The Other Time a Grown Man Threatened My Life,” the narrator is driving home from another party when she sees something in the middle of the road. “I noticed it just in time. It was a boulder, a big chunk of sandstone from the cliffs above.” She gets out and pushes the boulder into the other lane. I can’t stop thinking about it: this young woman pushing an annoying huge rock out of her way, wiping the sand on her jeans, and going on like it was nothing.

I keep returning to the cigarette-lighter exchange—and to the moving of the boulder. Each time, we find a young woman in a no-choice situation, quietly gaining control.

– Ashleigh Bryant Phillips Author of  Sleepovers

Juliet Escoria

Juliet Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac . She also wrote the poetry collection  Witch Hunt  and the story collection  Black Cloud . She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia.

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An excerpt from YOU ARE THE SNAKE by Juliet Escoria

There was this weird hippie guy who hung around the Palms. He owned a van and a llama and not much else. We called him Van Man. I didn’t know the name of the llama. The two of them slept in the van every night at the far end of the parking lot, Van Man in the driver’s seat, llama in the back. He’d cut out panels in the van so the llama could stick its head out. It didn’t seem like a very comfortable living arrangement, but what did I know?

One day I was working the cash register at the bookstore when Van Man came into the store with the llama. He walked right over to the magazines, the lead for the llama wrapped loosely around his fingers like he was holding a balloon. It was dead silent for a second, a thick communal shock, everyone staring at the man and his llama. The moment passed, and everyone began talking over one another at once. A fucking llama. In a fucking bookstore.

I really liked my manager, this nice guy with a trendy beard who’d gotten me into Bret Easton Ellis, but when he told Van Man to get out of the bookstore, he seemed like nothing more than a spineless little bitch. “Come on,” my manager said. “Let’s be cool. Take the llama out of the store.”

“There’s not a sign,” Van Man said. And it was true. There wasn’t. There was a sign that said no dogs but it mentioned nothing about cats or rabbits or llamas. But there wasn’t a sign about how you weren’t allowed to bomb the store or light the books on fire or jerk off in the erotica section (which had happened before) either.

My manager left to call security. Everyone was just standing around, staring, as Van Man paged through the new issue of Maxim . A few minutes later, the security guard showed up. He was a pathetic man, pink and doughy. My friends and I all worked in the shopping center—the bagel store, the Meineke, the sandwich shop—and when we got off work, we met up at the tables in front of the movie theater to talk and smoke, waste time until there was something better to do, somebody’s parents out of town, a bonfire at the beach. We knew all the security guards. We called this one Tweety because of his car, a yellow RAV4 with a Tweety Bird sticker on the window and a Tweety Bird tire cover and a personalized TWTYBRD license plate. It was impossible to take him seriously ever—not when he yelled at us for drinking or smoking or making too much noise. The worst he could do was order us off the property. When that happened, we walked across the drop-off area to do the same things we did at the tables but in front of the stop sign instead.

“You gotta go,” he told Van Man.

“Whatever, man,” Van Man said, like some stoned guy in some stoner movie. “I’m just reading a magazeeeeeeeen.”

“You gotta get the llama out of here,” Tweety told him, and pulled on his arm, the one that wasn’t holding the llama lead.

That pissed Van Man off. He started flailing his arms, which yanked on the llama lead, which made the llama let out a long weird snort like a horse. But finally he relented, petted the llama on the nose to settle it down, allowed himself to be escorted out of the store. They were at the door when Tweety told him, “And don’t you come back,” trying too hard to play a role.

Van Man laughed, like he had the exact same thought as me. “Hope this makes you feel real big, mister badgey-badgey five-dollars-an-hour man,” he said. “Mister badgey five-dollar fake pig.”

I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. I tried to stop, ring up the customer, a middle-aged woman buying a Dean Koontz novel. She seemed shook-up, clutching the shitty book. I couldn’t. “Sorry,” I told her, beeping the book under the scanner. I was still laughing when I gave her the change.

When I got off work, I went right up to the circle, sat down in one of the metal chairs, told the guys who were sitting there all about it. Mister badgey-badgey five-dollars-an-hour man. And from then on, that’s what we said to Tweety whenever he told us to be quiet or settle down or put away that beer.

The security guards all came and went, working at the Palms for a couple months or a year before disappearing, nearly indistinguishable from one another. Useless doughy guys with buzz cuts, weak rejects from the actual police, who rode around the shopping center in a golf cart because they were too fat and lazy to walk. Tweety had only stood out because of his car.

But one day, there was a new security guard at the Palms, different than all the rest. He was giant, nearly seven feet tall, and gorgeous in a scary way, cheekbones and angles, a shaved head that was almost sculptural. The first time I saw him I felt scared in a way I couldn’t explain. I’d just gotten off work when he walked around the corner. The security guards had these sticklike things they held up to various receivers around the shopping center until they beeped, I guess to ensure they were doing their rounds. He came around the corner, big and muscular and scowling, beeping his wand. His hair was so short you could see the perfect shape of his skull.

I still felt as though the security guard had something to do with it, had been one of the final straws that damned Van Man to his death.

Later that day, Colin, who was always around, Chandra, my best friend, and I were smoking a joint in the corridor behind the movie theater when we heard someone yelling. I stood up, looking over the low stucco wall we were crouching behind. I saw Van Man getting yelled at by the new security guard. “You get the fuck off this property,” the security guard was saying. Van Man was standing outside his van, next to the llama’s head peeking out. I waited for him to say something but he didn’t. Instead, Van Man walked around the van, opened the door, got in the driver’s seat. I heard the van turn on, put-put-put . I watched him drive out of the parking lot, around the hill, until he drove out of sight. The new security guard continued his rounds, walking. I never once saw him in the golf cart.

The new security guard ignored us for a long time, didn’t say a word as we sat at the circle and smoked. One day, though, it was the release of the latest installment of a movie franchise, and the space in front of the theater, our space, was packed. Someone had a big bottle of store-brand vodka, and we were passing it around, pouring it into soda cups. We were about to head out to one of the dirt lots that had appeared by the side of the new freeway, waiting to be turned into another subdivision, one of our go-tos when there was nowhere else to party.

We didn’t notice him at first. One minute nobody was there, and the next minute there he was, standing behind Colin, confusing because of his size. Colin was holding the bottle, pouring it into his can of Pepsi. The new security guard put his hands on Colin’s chair, one on each side of his neck. Colin was an asshole, didn’t care about respecting anybody, but he froze. The security guard’s eyes were blue and sharp like crystals. His face was completely expressionless. I couldn’t tell if he actually cared or if he was just doing his job. “Put the bottle away,” he said, quiet and calm, but there was something buried underneath his words that chilled me.

I wondered what Colin would do. Normally he’d make fun of the security guard, give him shit. But he just put the cap on the bottle, handed it to somebody, who put it in their backpack.

The security guard took his hands off the chair. As he walked away, I noticed something peeking up over his blue uniform collar. Fine black lines, uneven in color. I didn’t know a whole lot but it looked like a prison tattoo, the tip of an Iron Cross.

I was sitting at the chairs, waiting for Chandra to arrive. There was an old paper sitting on one of the far tables and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I walked over and picked it up, paged through it. A headline caught my eye, buried toward the back of the paper.

Ocean Beach Victim Was Colorful Local Known as the “Llama Man”

The article was about Van Man. The Llama Man was Van Man. He was dead, had been found drowned twenty miles south in OB, weights on his ankles and rocks in his pockets. A suicide note had been left in the sand. He was bipolar, the article said. He’d given away the llama a few days earlier to a guy in the neighboring county with a farm. This was a week ago, shortly after the new security guard told Van Man to leave. I didn’t think he’d been murdered or anything as conspiratorial as that, but I still felt as though the security guard had something to do with it, had been one of the final straws that damned Van Man to his death.

A couple weeks later, it was a Friday but there wasn’t anything to do. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and a lot of people were busy or out of town so there was a smaller group than usual, maybe fifteen of us, trying to figure out where we could go. Finally we decided on the beach. There were few enough of us that the cops probably wouldn’t come. None of us were old enough to buy alcohol except for Colin. We pooled together money, and there was only enough for a case of beer and a pint of cheap vodka but that was fine. We handed the money to Colin. “I lost my ID,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Yeah, I lost it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Then he disappeared with the money. Maybe he was going to steal it. Maybe he knew someone working at the gas station. But he came back empty-handed.

“What the fuck?”

“Be patient,” Colin said. He had a little smile on his face, the way he did when he’d come up with a good scam. When nobody was looking a few minutes later, he waved at me to follow him. We walked behind the theater to his car, a beat-up maroon IROC-Z with broken windows that wouldn’t roll down. It reeked in that car, from Colin always hotboxing it with cigarettes due to the broken windows. We got in the car and drove around the corner to the alley. I was just about to ask Colin what we were doing when the new security guard walked up. He was carrying a case of Miller Lite and a paper bag. He handed it to Colin, who got out of the car to put it in the trunk. I watched them bump fists in the rearview. “Thanks, Derrick,” Colin said, the first time I heard his name. The security guard, Derrick, said nothing to me, simply looked back at me with a face full of hatred, like he knew I possessed some despicable secret.

This happened a few more times—Derrick buying us beer—until eventually he started partying with us. It was another lame night, nowhere to go, so we just went across the street to Beer Woo, this vacant lot that was supposed to turn into another shopping center but was empty for years instead, due to some boring fight with the city council. It was higher than the shopping center and nobody ever seemed to notice us, which felt a little magical, hiding in the camouflage of plain sight. Derrick had two cases of beer, Miller Lite again, and also a bottle of Jameson. We walked across the street and he didn’t say anything, and I was starting to think he was just straight-up mean. But when we got to Beer Woo, he asked me for a cigarette and I gave him one and then he handed me the bottle of Jameson. I opened it, but I didn’t have anything to drink out of, and I was afraid he’d yell at me if I put my mouth on the bottle. He seemed to notice, some animallike intuition. “Go on,” he said. “Take a sip.”

I took a pull from the bottle. It burned. I handed it back to him, and he took a sip too, his mouth touching the same part of the bottle as mine. I knew there was logically no meaning in that but I still felt violated, knowing a part of myself was now a part of him too, a weird thrill.

He asked me for a light so I pulled out my lighter. He tried to do the thing that creepy guys always do, making you light their cigarette, or the reverse, so there was no choice but to be close to their body. I pretended not to notice, placed the lighter in his hand. “You can keep it,” I said, even though it was the only one I had. I walked away, pretended to just notice Chandra, hugged her like I hadn’t last seen her a few minutes ago.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“He creeps me out,” I said.

“Who? Derrick?”

“Shhh,” I said. “I don’t want him to hear.”

Chandra looked at me, confused. She seemed to think Derrick was fine, no different than the rest of us.

Derrick came out with us a lot after that. I learned that he lived in El Cajon, thirty minutes away and one of the shittiest places to live in San Diego County. In San Diego, everyone said that anywhere that wasn’t the coast was filled with white supremacists—El Cajon, Santee/Klan-tee, Spring Valley, Lakeside. Racists. El Cajon was the shittiest of them all. At least Santee looked like a generic Southern California suburb, with tree-lined streets and the big Costco. El Cajon, on the other hand, was hot, poor, and ugly.

It didn’t matter, though, because Derrick was an actual racist. A skinhead. He listened to horrible music, racist punk and racist death metal. The lines I’d seen on his neck were indeed a prison tattoo, or at least that’s what he said, eighteen months in San Quentin. Of course it was San Quentin. There was another tattoo on his chest, which I saw when he took off his uniform, two lightning bolts like a regular fucking Nazi.

For some unfathomable reason, Chandra didn’t believe me, as though the tattoos and music and shaved head were random aberrations.

I didn’t know if I believed him. He never gave details about what his crimes entailed, wouldn’t tell us why he was sent to prison. But mostly I didn’t believe him because I couldn’t imagine a security guard firm in Santa Bonita hiring a felon.

Nobody seemed to care except me, including Chandra, who was half Mexican. Derrick didn’t seem to notice her eyes or her skin or her last name, Martinez. Chandra didn’t seem to notice either, the bad music or the bad tattoos. The two of them even made out one time. When we talked about it later, she didn’t even care. “What?” she said. “He’s hot.”

“He’s a fucking skinhead,” I said, but for some unfathomable reason, Chandra didn’t believe me, as though the tattoos and music and shaved head were random aberrations.

We were running this scam at Home Depot. One of us would go in, buy a spindle of wire that cost twenty bucks. The scam was that we’d steal one of the barcodes from the fiber optics cables that looked the same but cost five times as much. We’d peel off the original barcode, replace it with the stolen one. Then we’d drive to another Home Depot, return it, and pocket the difference. Home Depot gave you cash on returns, didn’t even want to see an ID. With the money, we bought beer and a room at the Motel 6 off the freeway. Eventually we got greedy, started to return two spindles instead of one, buy cocaine and kegs instead of just beer. The parties at the Motel 6 got so wild that we had to get a new person to rent the room each time because we left them so trashed.

It was late, maybe 4:00 a.m. We’d been doing lines of coke all night at the Motel 6. It brought that weird thing in the air, tense and thick. We ran out of drugs and Derrick didn’t know we were low and he got mad. All of a sudden he was yelling, indecipherable. His eyes were bloodshot and red. I guess a lot of the coke money had been his and he was mad it was gone.

“Dude,” Colin said. “You got to quiet down.”

Usually Colin was the one Derrick liked best, but that just pissed him off. I watched him get up, walk over to the shitty desk, and pick up an empty beer bottle. He stood there for a moment, frozen, before breaking the bottle on the edge of the desk. “You stole it,” he said, walking over to me, the broken bottle over his head.

I sat up from the bed. I had no idea why he was blaming me. I didn’t feel scared, for some reason. He looked so stupid, a big dumb boy, with big-dumb-boy tattoos. The look in his eyes was dull and blank and I was tiny and didn’t know how to fight, but still I felt like I could take him, somehow. I wanted to laugh at him, to tell him he was a stupid boy, but that didn’t exactly seem like the best move. So I just sat there, staring at him, his stupid cold blue eyes, and it felt like everything was both pulsing and frozen.

“Dude,” Colin said. “Everything is chill.”

Derrick turned to him, as though he had forgotten what he was doing. He dropped the broken bottle on the floor. I thought for a second that he’d calmed down. He walked over to the TV. He picked it up. He tried throwing it but it was still plugged into the wall. It yanked out when he threw it, but instead of launching in the air, it tumbled right down onto his feet. The TV broke with a pop. He screamed, high-pitched, like a little girl.

None of us knew what to do. When it came down to it, we were just nice suburban teens. We didn’t break TVs. Something seemed to shake loose from Derrick in that moment, all of us standing there, silent and horrified. He started laughing. “Shit,” he said. “I went a little crazy.”

Chandra and I left the hotel room after that. I wasn’t sober enough to drive but I had to get out of there. We took the coast home, thinking I’d be less likely to get pulled over that way.

We were up on the hill, right before the stoplight closest to my neighborhood, when I saw something in the middle of the road. I noticed it just in time. It was a boulder, a big chunk of sandstone from the cliffs above. We got out of the car. The night was dead silent and there was a bit of fog rolling in from the coast, everything washed out in the yellow of the streetlight.

Chandra and I were able to move it, just barely, out into the other lane. The sandstone got all over my hands, stained my jeans.

After the TV incident, we tried to stay away from Derrick, no longer invited him out, but sometimes he went up to the circle when he got off work anyway, came out with us uninvited. I did my best to ignore him, stay out of his way. I think he noticed. He was always staring at me, like everything was all my fault.

It was morning, way too bright, but I was sitting at the Palms anyway. It had been a long night and I was still too jacked up to go home. My mom was always threatening to drug test me, and if I failed the drug test, she’d kick me out, so I was staying away from home more and more. After checkout time at Motel 6, I had Colin drop me off here, until I could sober up and walk home.

I’d been sitting there for a few minutes, elbows on my lap, head hanging down, trying to get my bearings though it was hard in the hot sun, when I heard someone yelling. It sounded like a mess of nonsense except for two distinct words: fucking bitch .

I looked up, feeling dazed. The light was splotchy. I saw Derrick, maybe fifty feet away, walking toward me. He had a cup from Subway in his hand, was dressed in jeans, his security guard shirt on but unbuttoned. He started screaming at me. I had no idea why. I’d done nothing to him. He was calling me a bitch and a cunt, a stupid bitch, a dumb fucking cunt. He stayed across the pavilion though, away from me, which was confusing, like he was afraid of me. I didn’t say anything to him because it seemed so insane. I was just sitting there, hungover and tired.

Me not saying anything seemed to piss him off more. He started saying he was going to kill me. “I’ll murder you, bitch. I’ll bury your body in a shallow grave. You’ll rot, bitch.” He threw the soda cup at me but missed. I watched the ice splatter on the cement.

I didn’t know what to do. It all seemed so wildly illogical. I couldn’t help but imagine my decaying body, bugs eating my eyeballs.

I grabbed my purse without looking at him. I walked down to the bookstore, went into the break room, used the phone. I asked my mom to pick me up, waiting for her in the safety of the bookstore, looking out the window the whole time, just in case. When I got in the car, she said nothing about the way I smelled or the way I was acting.

We never saw Derrick again. All I know is he got fired. I don’t know why. I didn’t tell on him. That wasn’t how my friends treated it, though. They acted like I did it, like I’d conquered him, like I’d done something, anything, like I’d won.

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How to Write a Good Literary Analysis Essay: Complete Guide/Handout

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With this comprehensive & well-structured six-page packet, you can break down the essay-writing process into clear, manageable steps, addressing both Common Core and AP Literature skills, such as...

• Analyzing and responding to writing prompts
• Developing strong thesis statements
• Structuring effective arguments
• Using evidence and analysis to support claims
• Balancing evidence and analysis
• Avoiding summary in favor of analysis
• Writing cohesive introductions and conclusions

High-quality, actionable advice will solve common essay-writing problems:

✍️Help students who don’t know where to start with essay writing.

✍️Eliminate confusion about essay structure and organization.

✍️Solve weak thesis statements, unfocused paragraphs, & overreliance on summary (rather than analysis).

✍️Encourage better integration of evidence & quotations.

Teachers can save hours of explanation and repetition ; direct students to the guide for additional help and review! And for students, it offers a clear roadmap that can streamline their writing process . This is also a handout they can keep using year after year!

Ways to Use This Resource

• Distribute it as a reference tool : Give it to students at the beginning of the year or the beginning of a writing unit for them to keep and refer back to throughout the course.
• Use it for direct instruction : Go through the guide in class, explaining each section and providing additional examples or practice exercises.
• Assign it as homework : Have students read through it independently and come to class with questions or ready to discuss key points.
• Use it for revision workshops : Have students use the guide to peer review each other's essays or to self-evaluate their own writing.
• Break it into mini-lessons : Focus on one section at a time over several class periods, diving deeper into each aspect of essay writing.
• Remediation tool : Provide it to students who are struggling with essay writing for extra support.
• Parent communication : Share it with parents to help them understand what's expected in their child's essay writing and how they can support at home.

This guide explains how to write great literary analysis essays. Note that some people also call these critical analysis essays, text-based essays, close reading essays, expository essays, or theme analysis essays.

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Literary analysis: sample essay.

We turn once more to Joanna Wolfe’s and Laura Wilder’s  Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Analysis  (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016) in order to show you their example of a strong student essay that has a strong central claim elucidated by multiple surface/depth arguments supported by patterns of evidence.

Paragraph 1

Sylvia Plath’s short poem “Morning Song” explores the conflicted emotions of a new mother. On the one hand, the mother recognizes that she is expected to treasure and celebrate her infant, but on the other hand, she feels strangely removed from the child. The poem uses a combination of scientific and natural imagery to illustrate the mother’s feelings of alienation. By the end of the poem, however, we see a shift in this imagery as the mother begins to see the infant in more human terms.

Paragraph 2

There are several references to scientific imagery in “Morning Song” that suggest that mother is viewing the baby in clinical, scientific terms rather than as a new life. The poem refers to magnification (4) and reflection (8), both of which are scientific methods. The word “distills” (8) refers to a scientific, chemical process for removing impurities from a substance. The baby’s cry is described as taking “its place among the elements” (3), which seems to refer to the periodic table of elements, the primordial matter of the universe. The watch in the first line is similarly a scientific tool and the gold the watch is made of is, of course, an element, like the baby’s cry. Even the balloons in the last line have a scientific connotation since balloons are often used for measurements and experiments in science. These images all serve to show how the speaker feels distanced from the baby, who is like a scientific experiment she is conducting rather than a human being.

Paragraph 3

Natural imagery also seems to further dehumanize the baby, reducing it to nothing more than its mouth. The baby’s breathing is compared to a moth in line 10, suggesting that the speaker feels the infant is fragile and is as likely to die as a moth dancing around candlelight. A few lines later, the baby’s mouth is compared to another animal—a cat—who greedily opens its mouth for milk. Not only does the speaker seem to feel that the baby is like an animal, but she herself is turned into an animal, as she arises “cow-heavy” (13) to feed the infant. These images show how the speaker sees both the baby and herself as dumb animals who exist only to feed and be fed. Even the morning itself seems to be reduced to another mouth to feed as she describes how the dawn “swallows its dull stars” (16). These lines suggest that just as the sun swallows up the stars, so the baby will swallow up this mother.

Paragraph 4

However, in the last few lines the poem takes a hopeful turn as the speaker begins to view the baby as a human being. The baby’s mouth, which has previously been greedy and animal-like, now becomes a source of music, producing a “handful of notes” (17) and “clear vowels” (18). Music is a distinctly human sound. No animals and certainly not the cats, cows, or moths mentioned earlier in the poem, make music. This change in how the speaker perceives the baby’s sounds—from animalistic cry to human song—suggest that she is beginning to relate the baby as an individual. Even the word “handful” in the phrase “handful of notes” (17) seems hopeful in this context since this is the first time the mother has referred to the baby as having a distinctly human body part. When the baby’s notes finally “rise like balloons” (18), the speaker seems to have arrived at a place where she can celebrate the infant. For the first time, the infant is giving something to the speaker rather than threatening to take something away. The mother seems to have finally accepted the child as an independent human being whose company she can celebrate.

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Poet of the Natural World: Mary Oliver Papers Newly Available in the Manuscript Division

June 20, 2024

Posted by: Julie Miller

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This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, historian of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division

In honor of Pride Month, the recently acquired personal papers of best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and teacher Mary Oliver (1935-2019) are now open to researchers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The Mary Oliver Papers include some 40,000 items in more than 118 containers, dating primarily from 1934 to 2019. The collection documents Oliver’s creative life, friendships, and professional writing and academic careers. It includes correspondence, prose writings, poetry, notebooks, teaching materials, drafts, photographs, interviews, and speeches representative of Oliver’s love of nature, birds, and the seaside.

The Mary Oliver Papers were received by the Library in December 2023 as a generous gift of Amalie Moses Reichblum and Bill Reichblum, NW Orchard LLC. The Reichblums, who are members of the Library’s James Madison Council, were close friends of Oliver and executors of her estate. In addition to the archival collection, they established the Mary Oliver Memorial Event Fund for Emerging Poets at the Library, in keeping with wishes expressed by Oliver. A public inaugural poetry reading and interview sponsored by the fund was facilitated by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón at the Library in April. The Mary Oliver Papers were processed in the Manuscript Division in spring 2024 by archivist Elizabeth Livesey with the assistance of archives technicians Shandra Morehouse and Tammi Taylor.

Prominent in this newly available collection are materials pertaining to Oliver’s creative process and the publication of her work. Also represented is her life in the artist and LGBTQ+ communities of Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and her personal and professional relationship with her longtime partner, the photographer and bookstore owner Molly Malone Cook (1925-2005). Cook served as manager of Oliver’s literary career and public appearances. As a member of the Provincetown community, she promoted photography as a fine art and maintained a friendship network that included filmmaker John Waters and other local writers, artists, and photographers. Oliver praised Cook as her best and most discerning reader. She dedicated her book Long Life (2004) to Cook, and their book, Our World, features photographs by Cook and text by Oliver.

Photographs of Oliver by Cook taken in Provincetown, as well as snapshots of their life together, including their dogs and home, are available in the collection, as is a 1995 issue of Provincetown Arts featuring a photograph of Oliver on the cover taken by her friend Barbara Savage Cheresh. That issue of the magazine includes a few Oliver poems and an article on her importance as a nature poet by fellow poet and Walt Whitman aficionado Mark Doty.

Oliver’s papers reveal her to be a witty and expressive letter writer. Correspondence with friends, such as dancer and potter Paulus Berensohn (1933-2017) demonstrate her closeness to those who shared her love of walking in nature, and her feelings about meadows, marshes, woodlands, and waterways, and the herons, hawks, insects, and animals who inhabited them. Like Walt Whitman , whose personal papers are also held in the Manuscript Division, and whom Oliver memorialized along with Wordsworth and Emerson as key influences in her essays, Oliver carried small pocket notebooks with her as she went about her days. She used them to jot down trial lines of poetry and descriptions of the world around her. In one notebook, created during her time teaching at Sweet Briar College in Virginia in 1991, she described the sight of brown bats flying over the quad at night. In her poem “The Morning Walk,” published in Long Life , she writes of thankfulness expressed in the peewee’s whistle, the twisting of the snake, or by the beaver who slaps his tail on the water of a pond—or by a person (such as herself) who may reach out to embrace the oak tree, or take out a notebook to record what was being observed.

An application for a Guggenheim fellowship, meanwhile, reveals Oliver’s uneasiness at being pegged only as a nature poet, when in fact she was interested in many things, including democracy in the United States and the regional variety of its people. When awarded the fellowship, she used it to work on her poetry collection, American Primitive, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.

Spirituality and eco-consciousness are also important parts of Oliver’s orientation to living reflected in the collection. She kept a copy of the poems of the Persian poet Rumi on her writing desk. An Anglican, she also kept a Book of Common Prayer nearby and pasted times for daily prayer on her typewriter. She emblazoned the typewriter with a bold message to her writer-self, positioned just above the keyboard, that read simply “COURAGE.” In trial lines jotted in her notebooks and in her published poems, she posited that every tree, every bush, and every flower is a reason to expound, and that the gladness she felt in response to the natural world is its own form of prayer. She continued to support the importance of environmental sustainability and stewardship after moving to Florida late in her life.

On June 14, 2024, United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón dedicated a tribute to a Mary Oliver poem titled “Can You Imagine” at the Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts. The event inaugurated her “You are Here: Poetry in the Parks” site-specific poetry installation initiative focused on poetry of the natural world, cosponsored by the National Park Service  and the Poetry Society of America.

As Mark Doty observed in his Provincetown Arts article, Mary Oliver teaches us that “the created world is something to cherish” and the central part of her “art is … to return us to wonder.”

Do you want more stories like this? Then subscribe to Unfolding History – it’s free!

“The created world,” Mark Doty, “Natural Science: In Praise of Mary Oliver,” Provincetown Arts 11 (1995), 27.

I am thrilled that Mary Oliver’s collection will be available at the Library. Many, many thanks to the Reichblums and to everyone at the Library who helped make it possible — Barbara Bair not least among them.

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How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay

Table of contents

• 1 Understanding the Assignment
• 2 Preparatory Work
• 3.1 First Reading
• 3.2 Second Reading
• 3.3 Take Notes
• 4.1 Defining Your Audience
• 4.2 The Title of Your Essay
• 4.3 Literary Analysis Essay Outline
• 4.4 Introduction
• 4.5 Body Paragraphs
• 4.6 Conclusion
• 5 Revising the Essay
• 6 In Conclusion

Writing a literary analysis essay is one of the most difficult tasks for a student. When you have to analyze a certain literary work, there is a whole set of rules that you have to follow. The literary analysis structure is rigid, and students often are demoralized by things like that.

Our article hopes to be a comprehensive guide that can explain how to write literary analysis essay. Here is what you will learn:

• The importance of understanding your assignment and choosing the right topic;
• Organizing your critical reading into two sessions to get the most out of the text;
• Crafting the essay with your audience in mind and giving it a logical and easy-to-follow structure;
• Importance of revising your piece, looking for logical inconsistencies, and proofreading the text.

This way, you will be able to write an essay that has its own identity, its coherence, and great analytical power.

Understanding the Assignment

Let’s start with the first obvious step: understanding the assignment. This actually applies to all types of essays and more. Yet, it is an aspect still underestimated by many students. There are so many who rush headlong into a literary text analysis before even figuring out what they need to do. So, let’s see what are the real steps to follow before writing a literary analysis essay.

First, we need to understand why we are doing this and what is a literary analysis essay. The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to evaluate and examine a particular literary work or some aspect of it. It describes the main idea of the book you have read. You need a strong thesis statement, and you always have to make a proper outline for literary analysis essay.

Secondly, you always need to read the prompt carefully. This should serve as your roadmap, and it will guide you towards specific aspects of the literary work. Those are the aspects you will focus on. You should be able to get the main ideas of what to write already from the prompt. Failure to comprehend the prompt could invalidate the entire work and cause you to lose many valuable hours.

Preparatory Work

Great, so we understood what the purpose of a literary analysis is and that it is crucial to understand the prompt. Now, it’s time to do some preparatory work before you start your draft of the literary analysis paper.

When you write a literary analysis essay, the first thing you should do is select a topic. It is usually impossible to talk about a book or poem in its entirety. Choosing a more specific theme is essential. Firstly, because it will make your literary analysis paper more interesting. Secondly, it will also be easier for you to focus on a single aspect. This could be a single character or what style and literary techniques were used by the author.

At this point, it’s time to consider the broader context. For example, if you have picked a character, think about their character’s development and their significance. If you are analyzing literature looking for a specific theme, try to reflect on how it permeates the narrative and what messages it conveys.

Now, it’s time to frame your literary analysis thesis statement. This should be concise and clear. Think of it as the compass that will guide your analysis. Plus, if it’s clear to you, it’ll be clear to your reader as well. Do not underestimate this point because it can make everything way easier when you start. Finally, feel free to read another book review to get inspired.

Critical Reading

It’s time to read the work you will analyze. We talk about what we call critical reading. This is the heart of all literary criticism, and it consists of immersing yourself in the story. Because of this, it is advised not to read the story just once but twice.

First Reading

The first reading will serve to get a general understanding of the literary texts. This means comprehending the storyline, characters, and major plot developments. You should be able to enjoy it without thinking too much about the assignment. So don’t delve too deeply into analysis just yet.

Second Reading

Your second reading should be much more methodical. Here, you start analyzing things concretely without forgetting what your literary analysis thesis is. Resist the temptation to get lost in the narrative’s flow. Instead, go through a thorough examination and identify key literary elements and literary devices, like the plot, the character development, and the mood of the story. But also other literary elements: the symbolism, the protagonists, whether there is a first-person narrator or a third-person perspective, and whether the author uses figurative language when describing the main conflict.

Pay special attention to how these literary elements are interwoven into the narrative. For example, consider how character development influences the plot. Alternatively, how symbolism enhances the mood. Recognizing these connections will be crucial for your analysis. Finally, and this might be the hardest part, try to see how all of these literary analysis elements collectively contribute to the overall impact of the work. Ask yourself whether it all works together to convey the message the author wants to convey or not.

While reading, it’s important to take notes and annotate the text. Even a brief indication could be enough. You can do this to highlight passages or quotes that strike you as significant. But also to make connections between different parts of the story. These annotations and notes will become invaluable when you start a literary analysis essay.

Crafting the Essay

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to craft your lit analysis piece. This section will help you do just that. The main points focus on:

• Understand who you’re writing for and tailor your text accordingly
• Craft a compelling introduction using a powerful hook and highlighting your thesis statement
• Structure the body paragraphs in a logical and coherent way
• Summarize your analysis, summing up the main points and key takeaway

Follow our suggestions, and you shouldn’t have any issues with your work. But, if you are facing a time crunch and need assistance with writing your literary essay, there is an online essay service that can help you. PapersOwl has been providing expert help to countless students with their literary essays for many years. Their team of professional writers is highly qualified and experienced, ensuring that you receive top-quality literary works. With PapersOwl’s assistance, you can rest assured that your literary essay will be well-written and thoroughly analyzed.

Defining Your Audience

Before putting pen to paper, and even when you are familiar with the literary analysis format, take some time to consider your audience. Who are you writing for? Is it your professor or another reader? This will help you understand what type of analysis you are going to write.

The Title of Your Essay

If you are wondering how to choose a title , you should know that some prefer to choose it when they start, while others do it as the last thing before submitting it. Usually, the literary analysis title includes the author’s name and the name of the text you are evaluating. However, that is not always necessary. What matters is to make it brief and interactive and to catch the reader’s attention immediately.

Take this example of literary analysis: “Unmasking the Symbolism: The Enigmatic Power of the Green Light in The Great Gatsby”.

It works because, while introducing the story, it hints at the theme, the specific focus, and the intrigue of unraveling a mystery.

Literary Analysis Essay Outline

Writing a literary analysis essay starts with understanding the information that fills an outline. This means that writing details that belong in how to write an analytical essay should come fairly easily. If it is a struggle to come up with the meat of the essay, a reread of the novel may be necessary. Like any analysis essay, developing an essay requires structure and outline.

Let’s start with the first. Normally in high schools, the basic structure of any form of academic writing of a literature essay, comprises five paragraphs. One of the paragraphs is used in writing the introduction, three for the body, and the remaining literary analysis paragraph for the conclusion.

Every body paragraph must concentrate on a topic. While writing a five-paragraph structured essay, you need to split your thesis into three major analysis topics connected to your essay. You don’t need to write all the points derivable from the literature but the analysis that backs your thesis.

When you start a paragraph, connect it to the previous paragraph and always use a topic sentence to maintain the focus of the reader. This allows every person to understand the content at a glance.

After that, you should find fitting textual evidence to support the topic sentence and the thesis statement it serves. Using textual evidence involves bringing in a relevant quote from the story and describing its relevance. Such quotes should be well introduced and examined if you want to use them. While it is not mandatory to use them, it is effective because it allows to better analyze the author’s figurative language.

Let’s see a concrete literary analysis example to understand this.

✏️ Topic Sentence : In “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald employs vivid descriptions to characterize Jay Gatsby’s extravagant parties.

✏️ Textual Evidence : Gatsby’s parties are described as “gaudy with primary colors” and filled with “music and the laughter of his guests”.

✏️ Literary Analysis : These vibrant descriptions symbolize Gatsby’s attempt to capture the essence of the American Dream. The use of “gaudy” highlights the emptiness of his pursuits.

Now that you know how to write a literature analysis, it’s crucial to distinguish between analysis and summary. A summary only restates the plot or events of the story. Analysis, on the other hand, tries to unveil the meaning of these events. Let’s use an example from another famous book to illustrate the difference.

✏️ Summary : In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man accused of raping a white woman.

✏️ Literary Analysis : Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a rather bitter commentary on the racial prejudices of the time. In the book, Harper Lee highlights the rampant racism that plagued Maycomb society.

Introduction

The literature analysis essay, like other various academic works, has a typical 5-paragraph-structure . The normal procedure for writing an introduction for your literary analysis essay outline is to start with a hook and then go on to mention brief facts about the author and the literature. After that, make sure to present your thesis statement. Before going ahead, let’s use an example of a good literary analysis introduction. This will make it easier to discuss these points singularly.

“On the shores of East Egg, a green light shines through the darkness. The book is “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1925, and this is not just a light. It’s much more. It symbolizes the American Dream chased and rejected by Gatsby and the other characters.”

As an introductory paragraph, this has all the characteristics we are looking for. First, opening statements like this introduce a mysterious element that makes the reader curious. This is the hook. After that, the name of the book, the author, and the release year are presented. Finally, a first glimpse of what your original thesis will be – the connection between the book and the topic of the American Dream.

Afterwards, you can finish writing the introduction paragraph for the literary analysis essay with a clue about the content of the essay’s body. This style of writing a literature essay is known as signposting. Signposting should be done more elaborately while writing longer literary essays.

Body Paragraphs

In a literary analysis essay, the body paragraphs are where you go further into your analysis, looking at specific features of the literature. Each paragraph should focus on a particular aspect, such as character development, theme, or symbolism, and provide textual evidence to back up your interpretation. This structured approach allows for a thorough exploration of the literary work.

“In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Fitzgerald uses the symbol of the green light to represent Gatsby’s perpetual quest for the unattainable – specifically, his idealized love for Daisy Buchanan. Situated at the end of Daisy’s dock, the green light shines across the bay to Gatsby’s mansion, symbolizing the distance between reality and his dreams. This light is not just a physical beacon; it’s a metaphor for Gatsby’s aspiration and the American Dream itself. Fitzgerald artfully illustrates this through Gatsby’s yearning gaze towards the light, reflecting his deep desire for a future that reconnects him with his past love, yet tragically remains just out of reach. This persistent yearning is a poignant commentary on the nature of aspiration and the illusion of the American Dream.”

The final paragraph, as usual, is the literary analysis conclusion. Writing a conclusion of your essay should be about putting the finishing touches on it. In this section, all you need to do is rephrase your aforementioned main point and supporting points and try to make them clearer to the person who reads them. But also, restate your thesis and add some interesting thoughts.

However, if you don’t understand how to write a conclusion and are just thinking, “ Write my essay for me , please”, there are solutions. At PapersOwl, you get expert writers to help you with your analysis, ensuring you meet your deadline.

Let’s go back to Gatsby’s green light and look at how to write a literary analysis example of a good conclusion:

“Our journey through the green light of “The Great Gatsby” ends here. In this literary essay, we analyzed Fitzgerald’s style and the way this allowed him to grasp the secret of the American Dream. In doing so, we realized that the American Dream is not just about one person’s dream. Rather, it is about everyone who struggles for something that will never be realized.”

Here we have it all: restating the thesis, summing up the main points, understanding the literary devices, and adding some thoughts.

Revising the Essay

At this point, you’re almost done. After you write a literary analysis, it is usually time for a revision. This is where you have a chance to refine and polish your work.

Read your analysis of literature again to check coherence and consistency. This means that your ideas should flow smoothly into each other, thus creating a coherent narrative voice. The tone should always be consistent: it would be a terrible mistake to have a body written in a style and a conclusion in a different style.

Use this final revision to refine the thesis and overall the literary argument essay. If you see there are some flaws in your discourse or some weak and unsupported claims, this is your last chance to fix them. Remember, your thesis should always be clear and effective.

Finally, do not underrate the possibility of spelling and punctuation errors. We all make mistakes of that kind. Read your piece a few times to ensure that every word is written correctly. Nothing bad with a couple of typos, but it’s even better if there is none! Finally, check if you used transition words appropriately.

The revision process involves multiple rounds of review and refinement. You could also consider seeking feedback from peers or professors. This way, you could gain a new perspective on your literary analysis.

In Conclusion

Educational institutions use works like the textual analysis essay to improve the learning abilities of students. Although it might seem complex, with the basic knowledge of how to go about it and the help of experts, you won’t find it difficult. Besides, if everything else fails, you can still try buying essays online at PapersOwl.

In this guide, we went through all the steps necessary to write a successful literary analysis. We began by understanding the assignment’s purpose and then explored preparatory work, the structure of a literature essay critical reading, and the actual crafting. In particular, we showed how to divide it into an introduction, body, and conclusion. Now it’s your turn to write a literary criticism essay!

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To Make a Short Story Long: Theories of Adapting Short Fiction

The adaptation of short stories goes back to the beginning of cinema and continues today, yet the practice receives relatively little critical attention. While much energy has been spent theorizing film adaptation of the novel, there exists virtually no systematic treatment of the practice of adapting short fiction. [1] Despite this lack, a close look suggests that the adaptation of short fiction represents differences of kind, and not just of degree, from that of the novel, differences that yield fertile ground for the adaptation-critic. Andre Bazin’s “Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest” models film adaptation around the acts of cutting, streamlining, and condensing a source, a system that works extremely well with the novel. But as Linda Hutcheon points out, “[N]ot all adaptations involve simply cutting. Short stories in particular… have had to expand their source material considerably.” In discussing her approach to adapting “Brokeback Mountain,” Diana Ossana points to the compact nature of the short story as an enabling asset: “We did not have to streamline or condense. We had the luxury of using our own imaginations to expand and build upon the blueprint, rounding out characters, creating new scenes, fleshing out existing ones.” 

Potential approaches: Beyond adaptation-as-expansion, the adaptation of short stories suggests many avenues of critical exploration. For instance, as practiced by auteur filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Robert Altman, it allows critics to interrogate notions of authorship; recombinant adaptations of the work of authors like Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami, and Angela Carter complexify the adaptation process by using multiple stories to construct their narrative; the fact that short fiction generally has little or no pre-soldness removes much of the need for fidelity and invites engagements with a range of industrial concerns; there is also short film to consider (Wes Anderson just adapted four Roald Dahl stories into short films, one of which won an Academy Award [2] ); and most fairy tales, which are consistently adapted in myriad ways, are also short fiction. Adapters have been creatively processing short stories for centuries, this collection invites essays that explore the cultural dynamics and critical implications of that adaptation.

This book seeks to rehearse and develop a series of innovative theoretical models that derive from the cultural process of adapting short fiction. As such, essays should demonstrate working knowledge of contemporary adaptation studies and a commitment to adding to that discourse. Contributions may examine individual adaptations, adaptation cycles, or other approaches, but always with an eye toward the various ways a focus on adaptations of the short story can add to our theoretical understanding of the act of adaptation.

Send inquiries to Glenn Jellenik ( [email protected] ). 500-word abstracts and 2-page CVs due by December 15, 2024 via email.

December 15, 2024: Abstracts Due

February 28, 2025: Authors contacted for inclusion in volume

July 15, 2025: First drafts full essays

[1] The scant existing criticism consists mainly of case studies of specific adaptations.

[2] The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix, 2023)

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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A place for questions and discussion related to literature, its production, its history. NOT a place for getting people to do your homework.

Monographs/papers/studies/etc about Canadian literature?

Hi, I just started reading “The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories,” so I’m looking for works of literary criticism to help contextualize, intersplice, and explore the stories (and further Canadian literature I may read). Thanks!