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Published in 1928, Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is a personal essay that illustrates the author's experience of living as a Black woman. Through metaphors, controversial statements, and anecdotes, Hurston implies that she...

In the summer of 1937, Daphne Du Maurier’s husband was assigned as the commanding officer of the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Alexandria, Egypt. Du Maurier left her two daughters with their nanny in England and accompanied him to...

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet whose work spanned more than half a century. Throughout his career, his poetry centered the beauty of the islands where he was born, and where he lived for much of his life. His work often considers themes of...

Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, which concerns a difficult relationship in which both the speaker and the lover lie to each other, was initially published in 1599 in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim. The book was attributed to William...

"The Hill We Climb" was first performed by Amanda Gorman on January 20, 2021, at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. As the youngest inaugural poet in history and the first National Youth Poet Laureate, Gorman's performance was an...

"Storm on the Island" is a poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, first published in his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist. It has been interpreted as an allegory for political tensions in Northern Ireland, though it does not allude to these...

Published in 1942, Ismat Chughtai's Urdu short story "The Quilt" ("Lihaaf") is about a young girl who is molested by her mother's adopted sister, Begum Jaan. Narrated from the perspective of the unnamed young girl, the story first focuses on Begum...

"Refugee Blues," published in 1939 by the American-English writer W.H. Auden, is a blues poem describing the experiences and struggles of a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism. The poem was published on the eve of Britain's entry into World War II,...

“Facing It” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

Komunyakaa was deployed in Vietnam from 1969-1970 as a war correspondent for the military newspaper The Southern Cross, and witnessed the war’...

Of her over 70 novels, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is her most famous, and possibly the most widely read mystery novel ever published. Published in novel form in 1934, it was first released as a serialized story in the Saturday...

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a part-autobiographical poem reflecting on the losses that the poet encountered throughout her lifetime. The nineteen-line poem is written in villanelle form and is divided into six stanzas. The poet considers the...

Published in 1914, Saki's "The Lumber Room" is a comedic short story about Nicholas, a mischievous upper-class English boy who uses his cleverness and imagination to subvert his aunt's authority.

After putting a frog in his breakfast, Nicholas has...

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a 2017 novel by Jesmyn Ward. The story follows a biracial family living in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. There are three narrators that relate the story's events in alternating chapters. The narrators are...

Frogs, or The Frogs, is one of Aristophanes's greatest comedies and is justly celebrated for its wit and keen commentary on Athenian politics and society. It is the last surviving work of Old Comedy and is thus also notable for its heralding a...

Published in 1939, Sinclair Ross's "The Painted Door" is a short story about Ann, a farmer's wife who has an affair while her husband is away during a fierce winter storm. Feeling an increasing sense of isolation, alienation, and resentment, Ann...

Despite appearing later in her career, Nights at the Circus, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1984, stands as one of the most important novels in Angela Carter’s vast oeuvre of fiction, in terms of expanding her readership and bringing...

Published in 2003, Jerry Spinelli's Loser is a children's novel about a boy who struggles to fit in with his peers due to his clumsiness, poor grades, and lack of self-awareness. Nicknamed "Loser" after failing to win a team race, Donald Zinkoff...

Xala is a novel by Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène, originally written in French in 1973. The following year, it was made into an award-winning movie by Sembène himself, and it was translated into English as part of the influential Heinemann...

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Matthew Warchus, Pride (released in 2014) tells the true story of Mark Ashton and a group of lesbian and gay activists who started a group to raise money for British miners who were affected by the British Miners'...

Written in 1952, Chinua Achebe's short story "Marriage is a Private Affair" is about a Nigerian father who rejects his son's decision to marry for love instead of accepting an arranged marriage. While arranged marriages are traditional in the...

Cate Kennedy's second short story collection, Like a House on Fire, was published in 2012 by Scribe. In the collection, Kennedy explores topics of displacement, illness, recovery, dependence, and motherhood, among other things. The stories in this...

Hatchet, published by Bradbury Press in 1987, is Gary Paulsen's best-known novel. It is the first of five in the Hatchet series, detailing the events in Brian Robeson's life after he ends up stranded in a forest after the pilot of a bush plane he...

O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," written in 1907, is a comedic short story about two kidnappers who are traumatized by the ten-year-old they abduct, eventually having to pay the boy's father to take him back. Although the kidnappers are...

Seamus Heaney's poem "Death of a Naturalist" appears in a collection with the same name. Published in 1966, Death of a Naturalist is recognized as Seamus Heaney's first major volume, and it was well-received by critics, boosting Heaney's career...