50 Essays: A Portable Anthology directly addresses students' and instructors' concerns that composition readers are too expensive and too large. At less than half the size and price of comparable readers, 50 Essays meets the needs of a wide variety of classrooms. The carefully chosen table of contents presents enough familiarity to reassure instructors, enough novelty to keep things interesting, and enough variety to accommodate many different teaching needs. The editorial apparatus has been designed to support that variety of needs without being intrusive. In its second edition, 50 Essays continues to offer selections that instructors love to teach, with even more flexibility and more support for academic writing.