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“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was written in 1888 when Yeats was living in London. It was first published in the National Observer in 1890 and reprinted in Yeats’s collection The Countess...

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles is a novel adaptation of Homer’s Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend and lover, from their time as young princes to Achilles’ ultimate death in the climactic battle of the Trojan...

“The Sea Eats the Land at Home” is a 1964 poem by the Ghanaian author Kofi Awoonor, describing the devastation that occurs in a coastal town following a flood, while simultaneously exploring themes of colonialism and cultural erosion. It was...

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) was the first novel published by English author Agatha Christie, who is widely considered to be the queen of detective fiction. As well as introducing Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective persuaded out of...

"London Snow" is an 1890 poem by Robert Bridges that describes the effects of a heavy snow on late-nineteenth-century London. The poem, in evoking the ethereality and beauty of the snow, implicitly criticizes industrial and urban lifestyles while...

Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo is an illustrated children’s book about a boy who imagines running his own zoo. Because of the book's racist illustrations, Random House stopped publishing If I Ran the Zoo in 2021.

Disappointed with the dull lion...

Although now less well known than some of her contemporaries, Lady Mary Wroth was one of the great masters of the English sonnet, along with Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and Shakespeare. Wroth is best known for her sonnet sequence Pamphilia to...

Sylvia Plath's poem "The Applicant," a satirical exploration of marriage and gender norms framed through the context of a surreal interview, originally appeared in The London Magazine before being published in Plath's 1965 collection Ariel. Though...

Harlem Hopscotch is a poem written and recorded by famed civil rights leader Dr. Maya Angelou in her spoken-word collection The Poetry of Maya Angelou (1969). The poem was later published in her anthology collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of...

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is the last—and best-selling—book Dr. Seuss published in his prolific career. Since its publication in 1990, the book has sold over twelve million copies, surpassing beloved classics like The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax,...

The Thief and the Dogs is a novel written by Naguib Mahfouz. The novel was published in 1961, and is seen as a political statement about the 1952 Egyptian revolution and the disappointment Mahfouz and many others felt after the revolution.

The...

The Rosie Project was originally written as a screenplay when Graeme Simsion studied screenwriting at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia in 2006-2007. By 2008, he had completed a draft of a screenplay called The Klara Project, a romantic...

“My Papa’s Waltz,” a 1948 poem by the American writer Theodore Roethke, explores themes of familial conflict, abuse, and intergenerational masculinity through descriptions of a father and son dancing. The poem was published in 1942, but also...

How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is the sixth book for adults in the How to Read... series by Thomas C. Foster. Foster previously wrote How to Read Literature Like a Professor (first published in 2003, and revised in 2014), followed by How...

"Poppies in October" is a short poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath, focusing on the contrast between urban and rural life and on the world's capacity to produce unexpected beauty. The poem was published in Plath's 1965 poetry collection ...

"The Next War" is a 1917 poem by the British writer Wilfred Owen, in which a soldier narrates his experiences with a personified version of death in order to ultimately condemn the nationalistic forces behind war. Like many of Owen's poems, "The...

One of Percy Shelley's most beloved poems, "The Cloud," published in 1820, exemplifies the poet's revolutionary spirit as it transforms the work's namesake into a universal symbol of change. As the cloud undergoes a variety of transformations—a...

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers is a poem written by American poet Adrienne Rich. It was first published in her anthology collection, A Change of World (1951).

In the poem, Aunt Jennifer is sewing tapestries of beautiful and vibrant tigers. The speaker...

Donald Barthelme's Snow White, published in 1967, is a postmodernist retelling of the Snow White fairytale. Snow White and the seven dwarves—Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem, and Dan—share an apartment and the novel loosely focuses on the...

"Gretel in Darkness" is a 1975 poem by the American poet Louise Glück, exploring themes of trauma and justice through a retelling of the well-known fairytale "Hansel and Gretel." It was first published in Glück's collection The House on the...

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse is one of Anne Carson’s early fictional works, following Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Plainwater (1995). Published in 1998 to general acclaim, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was...

To a Mouse is a poem written by Scottish poet Robert Burns, published in 1785.

The poem describes the speaker’s regret at accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest. The speaker is forced to think about many others in a similar situation, in which...

"Amends" is a poem by the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Written in 1995, it was published fairly late in her career, in the collection Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995. The book responds to an American democracy Rich perceived...

Published in 1958, Langston Hughes's short story "Thank You Ma'am" is about an attempted purse snatching that turns into a lesson about dignity, generosity, and trust.

When a teenage boy, Roger, tries to steal a large woman's purse, the woman,...