MLA Book Citation: How to Cite a Book in MLA 9, Plus LaTeX

An MLA book citation in the Works Cited list has four parts in a fixed order: Author. Title. Publisher, Year. Everything else in this guide, from two authors to translated classics, is a variation on that line.

This page follows the MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021). It gives the core pattern, then the Works Cited entry and the matching in-text citation for twelve kinds of book, the rules for alphabetizing and indenting the list, a ten-row reference table, and a way to generate the whole list from a .bib file in LaTeX. The in-text side is covered in depth in MLA In-Text Citation.

How to Cite a Book in MLA: The Core Pattern

Last Name, First Name. Title of Book: Subtitle. Publisher, Year.

Okafor, Adaeze. The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens. Brightwater Press, 2024.

In the text, that book is cited as (Okafor 23). Element by element:

MLA Book Citation Examples by Type

Each example is for a fictional book and gives the Works Cited entry followed by its in-text citation. Page ranges in Works Cited entries are compressed the way the handbook does it: 211-38, not 211-238.

One author

Okafor, Adaeze. The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens. Brightwater Press, 2024.

In-text: (Okafor 23)

Two authors

Reverse only the first author's name and join the two with "and":

Harrow, Thomas, and Miriam Vance. Teaching Literature Online. Northfield UP, 2022.

In-text: (Harrow and Vance 47)

Three or more authors

Give the first author followed by a comma and et al.; the others are not listed:

Lindqvist, Mikael, et al. Digital Humanities: A Field Guide. Ridgeline Academic, 2021.

In-text: (Lindqvist et al. 112)

Edited book (citing the whole collection)

The editors take the author position, followed by the label editor or editors:

Harrow, Thomas, and Miriam Vance, editors. Teaching Literature Online. Northfield UP, 2022.

In-text: (Harrow and Vance 12)

Chapter in an edited collection

This is the form you need far more often. The chapter author comes first, the chapter title goes in quotation marks, the book title in italics, then "edited by" and the editors in normal order, the publisher, the year and the page range with "pp.":

Nakamura, Kenji. "Annotation as Argument." Teaching Literature Online, edited by Thomas Harrow and Miriam Vance, Northfield UP, 2022, pp. 211-38.

In-text: (Nakamura 215)

Note the commas: after the book title and after the editors, because from the title onward the entry describes a single container. A titled chapter or essay in a book by one author uses the same shape without the editors: Okafor, Adaeze. "The Ten-Minute Cliff." The Reading Mind, Brightwater Press, 2024, pp. 41-66.

Translated book

"Translated by" and the translator's name follow the title:

Reyes, Paloma. The Glass Orchard. Translated by Kenji Nakamura, Brightwater Press, 2019.

In-text: (Reyes 90)

If your paper is about the translation itself, put the translator first: Nakamura, Kenji, translator. The Glass Orchard. By Paloma Reyes, Brightwater Press, 2019. Cite it as (Nakamura 90).

Edition other than the first

The edition goes after the title, as an ordinal with "ed.", followed by a comma:

Vance, Miriam. Close Reading in the Classroom. 2nd ed., Northfield UP, 2023.

In-text: (Vance 58)

Named editions work the same way, abbreviated as the handbook does: Rev. ed., Expanded ed. The edition is required because page numbers differ between editions.

E-book

MLA 9 treats an e-book as a version of the book. Write "E-book ed." in the edition slot, or the platform's name if that is more specific (Kindle ed.):

Okafor, Adaeze. The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens. E-book ed., Brightwater Press, 2024.

In-text: (Okafor, ch. 3)

Because e-book "locations" change with the device and font size, cite the chapter rather than a page, with a comma after the author. If the e-book has fixed page numbers (most PDFs do), cite them as usual.

Multivolume work

When you use one volume, name it after the title; when you use several, give the total after the year:

Santos, Julia. A History of the Printed Page. Vol. 2, Ridgeline Academic, 2020.

In-text: (Santos 140)

Santos, Julia. A History of the Printed Page. Ridgeline Academic, 2020. 4 vols.

In-text: (Santos 2: 140)

The volume number is needed in the text only when the entry covers more than one volume; the colon and space separate volume from page.

Republished or classic work

The original publication year goes right after the title; the edition you read supplies the publisher and year:

Calloway, Eleanor. The Lamplighters. 1899. Brightwater Press, 2018.

In-text: (Calloway 34)

The original date is optional but helpful whenever a reader could mistake a reprint for a recent work. For a classic that has been edited, add the editor after the title: The Lamplighters. 1899. Edited by Thomas Harrow, Northfield UP, 2018.

Corporate author

Ridgeline Literacy Institute. Undergraduate Reading Survey 2025. Northfield UP, 2025.

In-text: (Ridgeline Literacy Institute 4)

When the organization is also the publisher, skip the author and begin with the title, giving the organization only as publisher: Undergraduate Reading Survey 2025. Ridgeline Literacy Institute, 2025. The in-text citation then uses the title: (Undergraduate Reading Survey 4).

No author

Begin with the title and alphabetize by it, ignoring A, An and The:

The Northfield Style Handbook. Northfield UP, 2022.

In-text: (Northfield Style Handbook 12)

Formatting the Works Cited List

• Heading. "Works Cited" centered at the top of a new page, in the same font as the text, not bold, not underlined. Use "Work Cited" if there is only one entry.
• Spacing. Double-spaced throughout, with no extra space between entries.
• Hanging indent. The first line of each entry starts at the left margin; every following line is indented 0.5 inch. This is what lets the reader scan the author names.
• Alphabetical order by the first word of each entry, letter by letter. Authors sort by last name; titles sort by their first word ignoring A, An and The. "Lindqvist, Mikael, et al." sorts under L regardless of the other authors.
• Same author, several works. Give the name in the first entry only; in later entries replace it with three hyphens and a period (---.), or three em dashes used consistently, and order those entries alphabetically by title. A work the author wrote alone comes before works written with others, and a co-authored entry repeats the full name rather than the dashes.
• One entry per source. A book you cite twenty times appears once.

MLA Book Citation Examples: Quick Reference

MLA Book Citations in LaTeX

In LaTeX the Works Cited list is generated from a .bib file by the biblatex-mla package, which is on CTAN and in every full TeX Live install. Load it with \usepackage[style=mla]{biblatex}; it uses the biber backend, so compile with latexmk -pdf or in an editor that runs biber between passes.

The .bib entry types for books

Write authors as Last, First and Last, First; the style reverses only the first name and switches to "et al." at three authors, as the handbook does. Put a corporate author in double braces, {{Ridgeline Literacy Institute}}, so biber does not split it into a first and last name. Type the full publisher name; the style replaces "University Press" with "UP" itself. Give page ranges with a double hyphen, 211--238, and the style compresses them to 211-38 with the "pp." prefix.

Complete example

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[letterpaper,margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[style=mla]{biblatex}   % biblatex-mla (MLA 9); needs biber
\addbibresource{books.bib}
\doublespacing

\begin{document}

One author \autocite[23]{okafor2024}, two authors \autocite[47]{harrow2022},
three or more \autocite[112]{lindqvist2021}, a whole edited collection
\autocite[12]{harrowvance2022}, a chapter in it \autocite[215]{nakamura2022},
a chapter of a single-author book \autocite[50]{okafor2024cliff}, a translated
novel \autocite[90]{reyes2019}, a second edition \autocite[58]{vance2023},
one volume of a set \autocite[140]{santos2020}, a republished classic
\autocite[34]{calloway2018}, and a book with no author
\autocite[12]{handbook2022}.

\printbibliography[title={Works Cited}]

\end{document}

The matching books.bib:

@book{okafor2024,
  shorttitle = {Reading Mind},
  author    = {Okafor, Adaeze},
  title     = {The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens},
  publisher = {Brightwater Press},
  year      = {2024}
}

@book{harrow2022,
  author    = {Harrow, Thomas and Vance, Miriam},
  title     = {Teaching Literature Online},
  publisher = {Northfield University Press},
  year      = {2022}
}

@book{lindqvist2021,
  author    = {Lindqvist, Mikael and Santos, Julia and Nakamura, Kenji},
  title     = {Digital Humanities: A Field Guide},
  publisher = {Ridgeline Academic},
  year      = {2021}
}

@collection{harrowvance2022,
  editor    = {Harrow, Thomas and Vance, Miriam},
  title     = {Teaching Literature Online},
  publisher = {Northfield University Press},
  year      = {2022}
}

@incollection{nakamura2022,
  author    = {Nakamura, Kenji},
  title     = {Annotation as Argument},
  editor    = {Harrow, Thomas and Vance, Miriam},
  booktitle = {Teaching Literature Online},
  publisher = {Northfield University Press},
  year      = {2022},
  pages     = {211--238}
}

@inbook{okafor2024cliff,
  shorttitle = {Ten-Minute Cliff},
  author    = {Okafor, Adaeze},
  title     = {The Ten-Minute Cliff},
  booktitle = {The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens},
  publisher = {Brightwater Press},
  year      = {2024},
  pages     = {41--66}
}

@book{reyes2019,
  author     = {Reyes, Paloma},
  title      = {The Glass Orchard},
  translator = {Nakamura, Kenji},
  publisher  = {Brightwater Press},
  year       = {2019}
}

@book{vance2023,
  author    = {Vance, Miriam},
  title     = {Close Reading in the Classroom},
  edition   = {2},
  publisher = {Northfield University Press},
  year      = {2023}
}

@book{santos2020,
  author    = {Santos, Julia},
  title     = {A History of the Printed Page},
  volume    = {2},
  publisher = {Ridgeline Academic},
  year      = {2020}
}

@book{calloway2018,
  author    = {Calloway, Eleanor},
  title     = {The Lamplighters},
  origdate  = {1899},
  publisher = {Brightwater Press},
  year      = {2018}
}

@book{handbook2022,
  title     = {The Northfield Style Handbook},
  publisher = {Northfield University Press},
  year      = {2022}
}

A few field notes. edition = {2} as a bare number is printed as "2nd ed."; a named edition such as {Rev. ed.} is printed as typed (the style also rewrites a spelled-out "edition" to "ed."), and there is no separate e-book field, so edition = {E-book ed.} is how the package's own MLA 9 examples enter one. origdate supplies the original publication year of a republished work, volume prints "Vol. 2" after the title, and volumes = {4} on an entry for a whole set prints "4 volumes." after the year (the handbook pattern abbreviates it to "4 vols.", so edit the output if your instructor is strict). Both forms were compiled with biblatex-mla 2.1a; the e-book entry renders as "E-book ed., Brightwater P, 2024.", which matches the handbook pattern earlier on this page. Everything else, including the comma versus period punctuation between elements, comes out of the .bib data.

Printing the Works Cited and the hanging indent

\printbibliography[title={Works Cited}] prints every entry that was cited, alphabetized by the style's sorting scheme, under the heading Works Cited. The title option is optional with biblatex-mla, whose language file already names the list "Works Cited", but it documents the intent. To start the list on a new page, put \clearpage before it. To center the heading as MLA wants instead of leaving it as a left-aligned section title, define a heading once in the preamble:

\defbibheading{mla}[\bibname]{\section*{\centering #1}}
...
\printbibliography[heading=mla,title={Works Cited}]

The hanging indent needs no work: biblatex-mla sets the list's left margin to \bibhang and outdents the first line of each entry, which is the 0.5-inch MLA hang. It also sets \bibitemsep to zero so that, with \doublespacing, the list is double-spaced with no extra gap between entries. If you are building the list by hand instead, the in-text citation guide has a two-line fallback using \hangindent. Repeated authors are collapsed for you: write the full name in every .bib entry and the style prints the later entries with three em dashes (———.), which the handbook accepts in place of three hyphens as long as a paper uses one form throughout; the package option longdash=false switches to hyphens.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you cite a book in MLA format?

The Works Cited entry is Author's Last Name, First Name. Title of Book in Italics. Publisher, Year. For example: Okafor, Adaeze. The Reading Mind: Attention in the Age of Screens. Brightwater Press, 2024. Capitalize the title in title case, drop business words such as Inc. and Co. from the publisher, shorten University Press to UP, and give the most recent publication year on the copyright page. The in-text citation is the author's last name and page number: (Okafor 23).

How do you cite a book with multiple authors in MLA?

Two authors: reverse only the first name and join them with "and": Harrow, Thomas, and Miriam Vance. Three or more: give the first author reversed followed by et al.: Lindqvist, Mikael, et al. The in-text citations follow the same cutoff: (Harrow and Vance 47) and (Lindqvist et al. 112). Never use an ampersand, and never list more than the first author when there are three or more.

How do you cite a chapter from an edited book in MLA?

Start with the chapter author and the chapter title in quotation marks, then the book title in italics, "edited by" and the editors' names in normal order, the publisher, the year, and the page range with pp.: Nakamura, Kenji. "Annotation as Argument." Teaching Literature Online, edited by Thomas Harrow and Miriam Vance, Northfield UP, 2022, pp. 211-38. Cite the chapter author in the text: (Nakamura 215). Cite the whole collection instead only when you are discussing the book as a whole, in which case the editors are the authors and the entry ends their names with "editors".

How do I make an MLA Works Cited list in LaTeX?

Use the biblatex-mla package from CTAN: \usepackage[style=mla]{biblatex}, then \addbibresource{books.bib} and \printbibliography[title={Works Cited}] where the list should appear. Books go in the .bib file as @book entries with author, title, publisher and year; chapters of edited collections as @incollection with editor, booktitle and pages; and titled chapters of a single-author book as @inbook. The style alphabetizes the list, applies the 0.5-inch hanging indent, abbreviates University Press to UP and compresses page ranges. It needs the biber backend, which latexmk, Octree and Overleaf run automatically.

Next Steps

The Works Cited list is half of MLA documentation; these guides cover the rest:

• MLA In-Text Citation – Every parenthetical case: et al., no author, no pages, qtd. in, block quotes and repeat citations
• AMA Citation Format – The numbered medical style, for comparison or your next course
• APA Headings – The five APA 7 heading levels, if your paper is APA instead
• LaTeX Footnotes – MLA permits content and bibliographic notes; this is how to set them
• Page Size and Margins – Letter paper and 1-inch margins with the geometry package
• MLA Paper Template – A LaTeX template with the MLA heading, running head, spacing and Works Cited already set up

Free LaTeX Tools

• LaTeX Preview – Try a snippet in the browser without installing TeX
• LaTeX Templates – Essay and article templates ready for a bibliography
• LaTeX Symbols Reference – Dashes, ellipses and other punctuation MLA papers need