How to Cite a Book in MLA 9 (Works Cited and In-Text)

The basic entry: four facts and the container logic

A standalone book needs exactly four elements: Author, Last First. Title of Book in italics. Publisher, Year. The city of publication left MLA in the 8th edition — anyone still writing 'New York: Norton, 2000' is citing by MLA 7 rules. Publisher names shorten predictably: Oxford University Press becomes Oxford UP, and an imprint like Alfred A. Knopf appears as printed on the title page.

The container idea explains the punctuation: elements follow a fixed order, separated by commas, each closing with a period where the next element begins. Title capitalization is headline style — capitalize principal words, including the second half of hyphenated compounds. A title ending in a question mark or exclamation absorbs the entry's period: What Is the What. Knopf, 2006. And italics matter more than students think — a book title set in roman type is the most visible single error on a Works Cited page, noticeable from across the room.

The numbers at a glance

MLA 9 Works Cited entries, case by case — the range, and where each row actually shows up in coursework. Skim it first; the sections below explain why the range exists and which row applies to you.

In-text citations: (Author page), always with a page

MLA's in-text form is (Morrison 45) — surname, space, page number, no comma, no p., no year. The missing year still surprises APA-trained students: MLA's logic is that the Works Cited list already dates everything, so in-text citations stay minimal. Narrative form flips it: Morrison describes Sethe's choice on page 45, or Morrison (45) describes... — both acceptable; pick one convention and hold it.

Two mechanics cause most lost points. First, the space: (Morrison 45), never (Morrison45). Second, block quotes — more than four typed lines — place the citation after the final punctuation, the reverse of every other MLA quotation. Page ranges announced in prose need no parenthetical at all: 'pages 45-49 trace the shift' already carries its locator. Where possible, name the page in the same sentence as the quotation so the parenthetical confirms rather than interrupts; readers who hop backward to find a locator lose the thread.

Ebooks, Kindles, and location numbers

Ebooks break page numbers because reflowable text has none. MLA 9's hierarchy: use page numbers if the file is a fixed-layout PDF identical to print; otherwise chapter or section numbers — (Morrison, ch. 9); otherwise Kindle location numbers — (Morrison, loc. 2210). The Works Cited entry gains a supplement at the end: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Kindle file — or a second container naming the database you read it in.

Location numbers age badly: they shift between devices and editions, so loc. citations are the format of last resort, and chapter citations are what instructors quietly prefer. Many ebook platforms display the corresponding print-edition page numbers in the margin; using those keeps citations stable across readers. Note the edition in the entry when pagination depends on it — two editions of the same novel disagree about page 45.

Multiple authors, editors, and the matrix

The author slot flexes by count. One author: Last, First. Two: first author reversed, second in natural order, joined by and — Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. Three or more: first author followed by et al. — Bradley, James, et al. Editors replace authors with Edited by after the title; when the editor is the main entry for an anthology, the name takes 'editor' after it: Kinsley, James, editor.

In-text follows the same matrix: two authors cite both — (Dorris and Erdrich 118); three or more — (Bradley et al. 77). The classic errors are a second author left in Last, First order, or a comma before et al., which MLA 9 drops. One more trap: a book read through a library database is still a book — cite the book's details, then the database as a second container. The database is the shelf, not the source.

Three minutes to a clean citation

Edge-case citations punish hesitation, not ignorance: the student who spends twenty minutes googling a no-author format loses more time to doubt than the format ever costs. Decide the pattern once — title moves forward, organization counts as author, n.d. when no date exists anywhere — and apply it mechanically. Consistency across your list matters more to graders than perfect recall of manual arcana.

Automate what's mechanical. The citation generator below formats journal articles, books, chapters and websites in all three major styles, including the awkward cases on this page. Paste the metadata, copy the output, done — the minutes you save belong to analysis, which is where rubric points actually live. Cross-check in-text forms against the table above and the reference list is submission-ready.