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Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface (2023) follows the story of June Hayward, a young white woman who has faced years of bitter failure while trying to break into publishing as a fiction writer. June's lack of success is contrasted by the...

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet, playwright, and actress who challenged the social norms of the early twentieth century. Her poem "First Fig," published in her 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles, concerns the intense and...

Survival in Auschwitz is a memoir written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was imprisoned in one of the Nazis' infamous death camps from 1944 through to the fall of the Third Reich in late 1945. Levi states that he did not write the book just to...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a magical-realist novel about a Tokyo cafe that offers customers the opportunity to travel through time.

The book is divided into four parts. The first section focuses on a woman who wants to go...

The Changeling is a Jacobean tragedy co-written by playwrights Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. It was originally performed in May of 1622 and first published in 1652 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley.

Critics have long speculated as to which...

The Painter of Signs (1976) is a novel by celebrated Indian author R. K. Narayan. It describes a tumultuous romance between a sign painter and a political activist.

The novel tells the story of a man named Raman, a perfectionist sign painter. He...

“Nikki-Rosa” is a free-verse poem first published in Nikki Giovanni's 1968 collection Black Judgement. The poem, which is autobiographical in nature, discusses Giovanni's childhood near Cincinnati, Ohio. The poem addresses the public perception of...

When Charles Dickens sat down to write what would eventually become the novel David Copperfield, he first intended to write an autobiography, a recollection of his tumultuous, eventful life. Many of his memories, however, were too painful for him...

Percy Bysse Shelley wrote "Ode to the West Wind" in a wooded area near Florence, Italy in one sitting on October 25, 1819. The poem was first published in 1820 in the collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems....

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, the book tells the story of a group of young women attending Appleyard College, an Australian boarding school in Macedon, Victoria. It details their mysterious...

Published in two parts in 1901 and 1902, Jerusalem is a multigenerational saga that tells the story of families in Dalarna, Sweden, and a Swedish church group who emigrated to a utopian Christian commune in Jerusalem, Israel. Inspired by a real...

“Daybreak in Alabama” is a poem by Langston Hughes about a composer who fantasizes about creating music that will embody the beauty of life in Alabama and thereby lead to healing and a better world. The poem became popular during the sixties due...

Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work centers on love, sex, food, relationships, conflict, and healing. In her poem "Basket of Figs," published in the 2002 collection Mules of Love, the speaker invites her lover to lay...

Stuart Little is a children's book written and published by E.B. White in 1945. It was this first book of White’s as well as his second, Charlotte’s Web, that secured his reputation as one of the most beloved American writers of children’s...

Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work is concerned with the complexity of life: relationships, conflict, the body, sexuality, and food. Bass's poem "The Thing Is," published in her 2002 collection Mules of Love, instructs...

Blood Brothers is a musical written by English dramatist and composer Willy Russell. It depicts the lives of twin brothers, Mickey and Eddie, who were separated at birth. One ends up being raised by a rich family and becoming a local politician...

Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to be one of his early comedies performed for the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Perhaps more than any Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to be directed toward the specific...

The Lincoln Highway (2021) is a road-trip narrative set in 1954 America, spanning a timeline of ten days and 1,500 miles across the country. Packed into ten short days is the story of four boys’ journeys to find their respective futures, as Emmett...

Rupi Kaur is a Punjabi-Canadian writer and performer whose work centers on themes of womanhood, abuse, love, and loss. She self-published her first collection, milk and honey, in 2014, and just two years later it became a New York Times-...

The Faerie Queene was written over the course of about a decade by Edmund Spenser. He published the first three books in 1590, then the next four books (plus revisions to the first three) in 1596. It was originally intended to be twelve books...

"Elegy for My Father's Father," which appeared in James K. Baxter's 1966 poetry collection Pig Island Letters, is a poignant and reflective poem that explores the complex relationship between the poet and his paternal grandfather. The speaker...

Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey is a play about a working-class schoolgirl's dysfunctional relationship with her mother. First staged in 1958, the play is a pioneering work in the British cultural movement known as kitchen sink realism.

The...

Louis Sachar’s Small Steps is a young adult sequel to Holes, and it follows the storyline of Theodore “Armpit” Johnson after he returns home from Camp Green Lake Juvenile Detention and Correctional Facility. Small Steps was published on January...

Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World is thought to have been first published in 1666, and is considered one of the first examples of science fiction novels. The novel follows a young woman named Lady Margaret, who discovers a portal to an...