MAINSTREAM LITERATURE
An earlier version of our textbook uses Roald Dahl's story "Lamb to the Slaughter" to teach literary terms. The full text is on the indicated web site.
Some years we started with Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants". The last site has a commentary on the story and an essay worth reading plus questions on the story. Teachers might be interested in looking at a site suggesting how to teach "Hills". or this page from Wikipedia about a white elephant as a metaphore.

In 1997/98 the first short story we read was "Good Advice is Rarer that Rubies". A group of students dramatized the dialogue between the consular officers and the protagonist when she was interviewed for a visa. It was howlingly funny. If you want to know more about the author of the short story, Salman Rushdie, You can find lots of excellent information on this web site.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost can be heard on Youtube.The following site has a lot of references about Frost's poems at the foot of the document.
On this site you can listen to several poems by Robert Frost,  among them "Mending Wall" and there is a good student essay about this poem on my page with good essays by students I have had. An Irish school site also has a very good interpretation. Look at this explanation about "Out, Out", the poem which is printed in our textbook.

Information about Willa Cather. You can read more about  her on a Finnish site. The full text of  "The Wagner Matinée"  is  available on this site. See this student essay about the short story!

Virginia Woolf was represented with the short story "The Duchess and the Jeweller". Read this article about the Jewishness in the Jew-eller.

Near Christmas I usually let my class hear Grace Paley's short story "The Loudest Voice". The story focuses on the difference between a Christian majority and a Jewish minority culture in a primary school around Christmas in Brooklyn, New York.
On the  6th of January each year we usually read T.S.Eliot: Journey of the Magi.  Read some comments on the poem here.  T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

The beat generation: Kerouac, Ginsberg and his poem "Homework", Ferlinghetti and his poem "Pity the Nation" based on a quote from Khalil Gibran.  Watch Ferlinghetti read the poem.  There is an allusion to the song "My country 'Tis of Thee" in the poem. Also check out the page: Poets against the war.

In 1998 shortly before he died, Ted Hughes published his Birthday Letters where he explains his relationship to his first wife, Sylvia Plath.  Also check videos on Youtube, a tribute to the poet Ted Hughes and a two part tribute to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Interpretaions of Plath's"The Mirror".  Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy", and her reading of her poem  "Lady Lazarus"

IRISH LITERATURE
Seamus Heaney: "Digging". Here you find more about the writer who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
And here is a site where you can hear Huck Gutman, Professor of English at the University of Vermont read and interpret 4 poems by Heaney.

We also read Bernard Mac Laverty's short story "Secrets".

Edna O'Brien, (the writer of "The Rug) from Irish writerw, and a biography here.