Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” has secured a place among the greatest works in that genre—the story is widely considered Hemingway’s greatest. To explore the richness of this work, David L. Anderson returns to a somewhat unusual approach, that of archetypal criticism, which allows us to examine the story in more universal, rather than strictly historical, ways.

How can we convince readers, and especially students, to slow down to the crawl that is often necessary to see the real power in the compressed language Hemingway uses to tell a story? Are there qualities of digital age life that make students, somehow, more connected to Hemingway’s life and his writing? How can we compare the 21st-century “transhumanist” interest in making ourselves into “something more than merely human” with Hemingway’s characters like Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Catherine Barkley, Pilar, Robert Jordan, or Santiago, all of whom similarly wrestle within the bounds of their own mortality? Laura Godfrey has assembled a group of scholars who speak eloquently to these questions.

In this comprehensive guide, Lewis and Roos reveal how A Farewell to Arms represents a complex alchemy of Hemingway’s personal experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918, his extensive historical research of a time period and terrain with which he was personally unfamiliar, and the impact of his vast reading in the great works of 19th-century fiction. Ultimately, Lewis and Roos assert, Hemingway’s great novel is not simply a story of love and war, as most have concluded, but an intricate novel of ideas exploring the clash of reason and faith and deep questions of epistemology.

Bradbury, though a celebrated author, is often shortchanged. He is valorized within one genre (science fiction) and marginalized in others (detective fiction, film scripts, poetry, and, yes, horror fiction). His importance and influence have been distorted by critics who never foresaw our present paradigm, one in which horror writers like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith are imprinted by Oxford, and Stephen King, once dismissed as a schlock meister par excellence, is awarded the National Medal of Arts.

In this expansive anthology, Susan Stagno and Michael Blackie assemble an insightful group of contributors to discuss the ways in which medical professionals can powerfully engage with their students through a variety of literary texts. Examples as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Leo Tolstoy, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Shelley, Stephen King, the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, and the sayings of Buddha will provide both teachers and students a rich cache of stories for discussion and inspiration.

What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed-laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same?

In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 a.m. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager who is asked, “What will you become?” These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey.

As bombs fell on London almost nightly from the autumn of 1940 through the summer of 1941, the lives of ordinary people were altered beyond recognition. A reclusive Oxford lecturer found himself speaking, not about Renaissance literature to a roomful of students but about Christian doctrine into a BBC microphone. A writer of popular fiction found herself exploring not the intricacies of the whodunit but the mysteries of suffering and grace. An erudite poet and literary critic found himself patrolling the dark streets and piecing together images of fire and redemption. C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot became something they had not been before the war: bearers of a terrible, yet triumphant, message that people could not expect to be spared from pain and suffering, but they would be redeemed through pain and suffering.

While visiting with Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie notices a bookshelf filled with such titles as Nymphs and Their Ways and Is Man a Myth? Beginning with these imaginary texts, Charlie W. Starr offers a comprehensive study of C. S. Lewis’s theory of myth, including his views on Greek and Norse mythology, the origins of myth, and the implications of myth on thought, art, gender, theology, and literary and linguistic theory. For Lewis, myth represents an ancient mode of thought focused in the imagination—a mode that became the key that ultimately brought Lewis to his belief in Jesus Christ as the myth become fact.

Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) may not be widely known, but her credentials as a poet are extensive; in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a loyal readership. In total she produced 17 volumes of new and collected verse. Her A Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937, and in 1954 she was awarded the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955; this unprecedented event merited a personal audience with the queen.

In 1956, J. R. R. Tolkien famously stated that the real theme of The Lord of the Rings was “Death and Immortality.” The deaths that underscore so much of the subject matter of Tolkien’s masterpiece have a great deal to teach us. From the heroic to the humble, Tolkien draws on medieval concepts of death and dying to explore the glory and sorrow of human mortality. Three great themes of death link medieval Northern European culture, The Lord of the Rings, and contemporary culture: the way in which we die, the need to remember the dead, and above all the lingering apprehension of what happens after death. Like our medieval ancestors, we still talk about what it means to die as a hero, a traitor, or a coward; we still make decisions about ways to honor and remember the departed; and we continue to seek to appease and contain the dead. These themes suggest a latent resonance between medieval and modern cultures and raise an issue not generally discussed in contemporary Western society: our deeply rooted belief that how one dies in some way matters.