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“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...

“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...