How do our online writing tutors do what they do so well? What research-based methods do we use to teach our students? Here’s our take on the first five effective instructional practices identified in the influential 2007 report titled "Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools.”

Robert Coover’s Briar Rose (1997) is a short but dense little fiction that plumbs the depths of the Sleeping Beauty legend, foregrounding the age-old patterns at the heart of its many variations.

Like many of McKillip’s best works, The Changeling Sea (1988) reads like a fable. It has the simple, classic feel of a story that’s been told a million times, repeated around fires and at bedtimes until all its edges have been rounded out and its contours are so familiar you think you might have dreamed them up yourself.

Ransom tells the story of Achilles: beloved hero of the Trojan War, bereaved of his companion Patroclus. But this isn’t the conventional tale of Achilles’ rise to fame, or even of his triumphs in battle. Instead, it’s an account of his reckoning with the loss of his soulmate, who dies on the field as a by-blow of our hero’s own pride.

The Vorrh is admittedly a lot to handle. It’s also an absolutely brilliant work of art. Brian Catling’s pan-medium creative background shines through to stunning effect in every inch of his prose; his style in this novel is immediate, tactile, shamelessly sprawling and descriptive.