The Buddha of Suburbia is the debut novel by Pakistani-British writer Hanif Kureishi. First published in 1990, the story follows Karim, a mixed-race teenager living in South London. The story takes place in the 1970s, a time of radical change in...

Time is a Mother is a collection of poems by Vietnamese-American novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, first published in 2022. Vuong's work often examines different threads of the poet's experiences growing up—he has referred to himself as “a queer...

Chimerica, a play by Lucy Kirkwood that premiered in 2013, explores the relationship between China and America following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Chimerica is a portmanteau of the words "China" and "America" that sounds similar to the...

The Lonely Londoners is a novel by Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon, first published in 1956. It depicts the lives of various West Indian immigrants, showing their efforts to build a life in England.

The novel focuses on a Trinidadian man named...

"The Man-Moth" was first published in 1946, in Elizabeth Bishop's collection North and South. However, it was originally written roughly a decade prior, during the 1930s. This work is regarded as one of Bishop's stranger, more surreal poems. It...

Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man, first published in 2022, is a speculative fiction novel about each member of a majority-white society spontaneously developing brown skin.

Set in an unnamed English-speaking country that has similarities to...

Nikki Erlick is an American author based in Los Angeles, CA. The Measure, Erlick's debut novel and her first attempt at a full-length manuscript, was published in June 2022 and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Erlick has explained that...

"A Small Needful Fact" is one of Ross Gay's most well-known poems. It was originally published by the poetry organization Split This Rock in 2015, and was shared widely across social media. Responding to the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of...

Originally a short story, "Wool" takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity lives in an underground silo. After receiving positive feedback on his work, author Hugh Howey expanded the story into a novel-length text, which he...

Killers of the Flower Moon, published in 2017, is a nonfiction book by journalist David Grann. It follows the investigation of several high-profile murders within the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe in Oklahoma.

The book begins in 1920, with...

"The Fish" is one of Elizabeth Bishop's most celebrated and widely anthologized works. First published in 1946 in the collection North & South, the poem describes the experience of a speaker who catches a fish and then closely observes its...

Oodgeroo Noonuccal is an Aboriginal Australian writer and political activist whose work centers the experience of indigenous people in Australia. "We Are Going," a poem originally published in her 1964 collection of the same name, examines the...

Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is primarily known for his novels, such as The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), but in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) he tackles climate change through the lenses of...

Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England" was published in 1976, in the poet's last collection, Geography III. It retells the well-known narrative of Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe's early English novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe's...

Luckiest Girl Alive is the debut novel by American novelist Jessica Knoll. It was published in 2015, at which time Knoll was working as an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. The novel sold well, and made the New York Times Bestsellers List. The...

Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Richard Cory," originally published in Robinson's 1897 collection The Children of the Night,...

Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Miniver Cheevy," a narrative poem published in Robinson's 1910 collection The Town Down The...

People of the Whale is a novel by American author Linda Hogan. Published in 2008, it depicts the trials of a Native American man named Thomas, and various members of his family, as they struggle with the loss of their culture in the face of...

Written and directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club (1985) is a comedy-drama film about five teenagers who forge unexpected bonds over the course of an all-day detention.

Taking place over eight hours inside a fictional Illinois high school,...

Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. The work was written in Latin and it was published in Louvain (present-day Belgium). Utopia is a work of satire, indirectly criticizing Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. More was a...