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Judith Wright is considered one of the most notable Australian poets in the country’s history, revered for her cerebral and evocative poems that explore the complexity of Australia’s natural landscape and its colonization by Europeans. Michael...

A fourteen-volume epic, The Prelude is William Wordsworth's account of his own life and growth as a poet, published in various editions between 1799 and 1850. Intended to be the forerunner to another epic work entitled The Recluse, this work is...

The Tale of Sinuhe (or The Story of Sinuhe) is an Ancient Egyptian text composed around 1875 BC. Concerning the life of a fictional man who flees Egypt and becomes a hero abroad, it is one of the earliest known literary texts.

Translated from...

In the field of Bengali letters, Mahasweta Devi is an important figure, castigating political authorities for exploiting the poor and underprivileged and criticizing the literary establishment for failing to raise their voices against social...

Originally published in 1891, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" is a poem by Emily Dickinson. In her lifetime, Dickinson was mostly known as something of recluse, rarely leaving her town or home. Her work was only published after her death in...

Venus and Adonis is a long narrative poem by William Shakespeare. It is historically important because it is believed to be Shakespeare's first ever published poem. When it was published in 1593, few had heard of the young man who would become one...

The Nickel Boys, published in 2019, is a novel by Colson Whitehead about the fictional Nickel Academy and its students (the "Nickel Boys"), based on the real-life Dozier school. The Dozier School, like its fictional counterpart, was a reform...

"Gimpel the Fool" is a short story written by Polish American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was the work that made Singer a notable author in the English literary canon. Having previously written predominantly in Yiddish, this story was...

Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" is a short story, first published in 1982, about a young man reuniting with his estranged family only to learn that his mother has died from eating poisonous fugu fish.

Likely set in...

Best known for plays like Ruined and Sweat, both of which earned her Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, American playwright Lynn Nottage has written a number of plays to great success. Her work typically deals with the difficulties of the lives of...

"I started Early – Took my Dog" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1862 and published in 1891, as part of her second posthumous collection, Poems: Second Series. Dickinson's poems were rescued from obscurity, following her death, by her...

Published in 1921, W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" is a short story about a fanatical Christian missionary who commits suicide after trying to save the soul of a defiant sex worker.

Set in Pago Pago Harbor in American Samoa, the story is told from...

Twilight in Delhi was Ahmed Ali’s first novel, set around 1911 to 1919, giving a descriptive image of India’s changing social, political, and cultural climate post colonialism, and recounting the state of Muslims in India during that time....

Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is a nonfiction novel about the “human computers” who performed the calculations that launched humanity...

Among director Wong Kar-wai's most critically acclaimed films, In the Mood for Love (2000) is a tale about two Shanghainese transplants who, after becoming next-door neighbors in Hong Kong, learn that their spouses are having an affair. Instead of...

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a novel published in 2008 by Canadian author Stephen Galloway. It takes place against a backdrop of war in Sarajevo during the years of the Bosnian War.

The novel is not an historical report of the Siege of Sarajevo but...

"Wild nights - Wild nights!" is a three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, composed in 1861 and published in 1891 as part of the second posthumous collection of her writing. Dickinson never titled her poems, so they are commonly referred to by their...

Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad was published in 2005. it tells the story of Penelope, Odysseus's wife in Homer's The Oddysey. In the novel, Penelope tells her life story, including her version of the events discussed in The Odyssey. While...

"Sultana's Dream," written in 1905 by Begum Rokeya (also known as Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain), is a science-fiction short story first published in The Indian Ladies' Magazine that depicts a society in which the practice of purdah is inverted, thus...

Often interpreted as an allegory for the experience of oppressed Black Americans, Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird" is a poem that compares the experience of a captive bird to a bird who lives freely. While the free bird soars through the sky and thinks...

"The Portent" is a poem by Herman Melville which describes the death of radical abolitionist John Brown. Brown was known for his murder of several slave owners at Pottowatomie Creek, Kansas and his failed raid on Harper's Ferry. The speaker...

Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain is a coming-of-age novel about a dysfunctional family living in Thatcher-era Glasgow, Scotland. The book won the 2020 Man Booker Prize.

Based on Stuart's own childhood, the novel centers on Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, the...

The Secret History is Donna Tartt's first novel; it was published in 1992, when Tartt was 29 years old. Like the protagonist Richard, Tartt had transferred to a small elite college in New England (Bennington College) after beginning her studies...

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is the debut young-adult novel by author Erika L. Sánchez. Prior to the novel's publication, Sánchez was widely celebrated for her poetry collection, entitled Lessons on Expulsion. I Am Not Your Perfect...