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John Donne is so widely quoted that he ranks near the top of the canon of well-known authors, not far behind his near contemporary, William Shakespeare. Perhaps his best-known line, from Meditation 17 in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a prose...

The novel now known as Roxana was published in 1724; it is the third and last of Defoe's major novels, following Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Moll Flanders in 1722. The original title was The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast...

The Dream House is one of South African novelist and playwright Craig Higginson's most popular novels. Published in 2015, it was adapted from a play of his entitled The Dream of the Dog (2010).

Higginson began writing the outline of a novel in...

Interior Chinatown (2020) is the second novel by American writer Charles Yu. It is the story of Willis Wu, a young Asian actor stuck playing two-dimensional caricatures like "Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face" and "Silent Henchman." Wu aspires to...

“Still I Rise” is one of Maya Angelou’s most celebrated poems. Originally published in 1978 in Angelou’s third volume of verse, And Still I Rise, it shares its title with a play she wrote in 1976 and was written during a highly prolific time in...

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1919, several years after the end of World War I. It is named after the Christian "Second Coming," which is the Biblical prophecy that predicts Jesus's return to earth to reign...

Pablo Neruda's "Love Sonnet XVII" is a modified Italian sonnet focusing on themes of intimacy, love, and self-expression. The poem was first published in Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets, or Cien Sonetos de Amor, in 1959. Like the other poems in that...

The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's first novel, was published in 1969 and established Margaret Atwood as one of the most important writers of the late 20th century. Atwood would go on to become famous for her use of socially conscious themes and...

Charlie's Country (2013) is a drama film about a Yolngu man who lives in an Indigenous "outstation" community on Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Although Charlie is supposedly free to live a traditional way of life among fellow...

Ann Radcliffe published her first three novels anonymously. The first two came and went with little notice among the public. The third—The Romance of the Forest—proved to be quite successful, however. So popular, in fact, that the unprecedented...

Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows (2015) is a fantasy novel set in the Kerch city of Ketterdam, inspired by Dutch Republic–era Amsterdam. The novel is the first in a duology and is part of the Grishaverse, with ties to The King of Scars Duology and the...

The White Tiger, published in 2008, is Aravind Adiga's debut novel. In its first year of publication, it was named a New York Times Bestseller, and was awarded the Man Booker Prize, making Adiga the fourth Indian-born author and, at age 33, the...

"Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)" is a 1924 poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in which a distraught speaker describes his feelings after the end of a relationship and attempts to express those feelings on the page. Through the...

W. Somerset Maugham's "Salvatore" is a short story about an Italian fisherman who conducts himself with kindness and humility despite dealing with economic hardship, heartbreak, and rheumatoid arthritis. Although Maugham begins and ends the story...

Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando stands as one of those works of literature that could not be fully appreciated in its time because it appears to have been written specifically for a future zeitgeist. Issues explored in the novel on the subject of...

"Lessons of the War I: Naming of Parts" is a poem by British journalist, translator, and poet Henry Reed, written during Reed's experience training as a military translator in Japan during World War II. It was published in the New Statesman and...

Seedfolks is a children’s novella written by Paul Fleischman and illustrated by Judy Peterson. The novella was published in 1997. In the novella, a culturally diverse group of residents in the Gibb Street area of Cleveland, Ohio, come together to...

“Mid-Term Break” is a poem by Seamus Heaney, first published in his debut collection Death of a Naturalist in 1966. The poem reflects on experiences from Heaney's own life. In 1953, when the poet was just fourteen years old, his little brother...

In Custody was published in 1984 by author Anita Desai and is one of her best-known novels. The American-Indian author has won a number of awards, including the British Guardian Prize, and In Custody was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993,...

Octavia Butler published Dawn in 1987. It centers on Lilith Iyapo, who has been kidnapped by an alien race called the Oankali. The human race has nearly killed itself off in a nuclear war. The Oankali picked up the surviving humans and placed them...

"The Cry of the Children" is an 1843 poem by the British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, commenting upon and condemning child labor. It was first published in the magazine Blackwood's Edinburgh, though Browning would go on to revise the poem...

Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an influential American poet, essayist, and prose writer. Rich’s self-reflexive poetry and prose exhibit themes that can be traced across the timeline of her life’s work. While her earlier works...

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (2009) is William Kamkwamba’s autobiography. He grew up in Malawi, a country deeply rooted in magic and the supernatural, and as a result, one that struggles to modernize....

"Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening" is a sonnet written by the English poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, using a description of an ominous nighttime landscape as an extended metaphor for the uncertainty of life itself. Written in roughly...