With a wide variety of genres, authors, subjects, and styles, The Norton Reader offers the largest and most thoughtfully chosen collection of essays available in one volume. Fifty-four new essays maintain the Reader's long-standing balance of classic and contemporary, canonical and lesser-known selections. The Eleventh Edition also includes important new coverage of visual and spoken texts—over fifty photographs, paintings, drawings, and other images that were originally published with the essays, as well as a new prose form chapter on the spoken word.

Available in this Shorter Edition, with fourteen thematic chapters, The Norton Reader has been carefully designed to support a wide range of teaching styles and situations.