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Maleficent (2014) is a dark, live-action retelling of Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of Maleficent, the original film's antagonist. The film explores Maleficent's backstory, emphasizing her sympathetic...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work examines the inextricable link between humans and nature. Originally published in Sheers's 2006 poetry collection Skirrid Hill, "Mametz Wood" is a poem that reckons with events from the past; specifically,...

"I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to" is a short poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Published posthumously, it was written during the early 1860s. Like much of Dickinson's work, it is brief and deceptively simple in form and...

Alan Gratz's Refugee is a young-adult novel about three young refugees from different eras: Josef Landau, a German Jew displaced from Nazi Germany; Isabel Fernandez, a Cuban fleeing her starving country in 1994; and Mahmoud Bishara, a Syrian...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work uses nature to symbolize human affairs, emotions, and relationships. First published in Sheers's 2006 collection Skirrid Hill, “Winter Swans” is a poem about a couple experiencing issues in their...

Marc Olden's Black Samurai (1974) is a crime thriller novel about Robert Sand, an American GI who is trained by a Japanese samurai master to become the world's strongest fighter. Working alongside a former US president, Sand uses his martial arts...

Life of Pi began with some casual reading. Yann Martel was perusing through John Updike’s rather negative review of Max and the Cats, a story about a Jewish family who run a zoo in Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. They decide...

Brigid Delaney is a leading Australian travel journalist working for the Guardian as a senior columnist and speechwriter for federal Ministers. Besides working for the Guardian, Delaney has authored two famous books in her native Australian native...

Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997) is a novel about William Henry Devereaux, Jr.'s (also called "Hank") mid-life crisis. Russo's novel is set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania and follows the aforementioned Hank, the misanthropic chairman of...

Born in 1969, Victor Gischler is an American author of crime fiction. Victor Gischler is a Ph.D. graduate in English from Southern Mississippi University, and most of his fiction work is translated into Japanese, Italian, French, and Spanish...

Ben Macintyre is a British author born in 1963 in Oxford, United Kingdom. Throughout Macintyre’s career, he has worked as a The Times newspaper columnist and author. Macintyre's columns vary from contemporary affairs to chronological debates....

Egil Krogh's Integrity (2007) is a book about the Watergate scandal, which rocked the United States and forced President Richard Nixon to resign. In his book, Krogh examines his role as the lawyer in charge of the group called "the plumbers," who...

Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaughn's Jesus Revolution (2018) is a history of the so-called "Jesus Movement," which swept across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. That movement, which Laurie and Vaughn say breathed new life into Christianity,...

The Duchess of Malfi is generally considered to be John Webster’s greatest work. He probably wrote it in either 1613 or 1614, and it was first staged before the end of 1614. The play was first performed by the prestigious King’s Men acting troupe...

The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson's four great comedies. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred in Oxford in 1610. It was also entered into the Stationers' Register in this year, though it might have been written and performed...

New Atlantis is an incomplete novel written by scientist and scholar Francis Bacon. Left unfinished, it was published posthumously in 1626 within a much longer text on natural history, Sylva Sylvarum. The official title is New Atlantis: A Worke...

Too Bright to See is a young-adult novel by Kyle Lukoff. It follows Bug, a young person, who begins to experience a series of supernatural events following the death of an uncle. Over the course of the book, Bug comes to a meaningful understanding...

Raymond Chandler, the creator of the Phillip Marlowe character, died in 1959. However, his estate enlisted the help of authors worldwide to ensure that more stories involving Marlowe continued to be told. Benjamin Melville (operating under the...

The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) is a novel by Paul Tremblay that tells the story of a couple named Andrew and Eric. Together with their adopted daughter, 7-year-old Wen, the three of them rent a cabin in the middle of nowhere to rest and...

Edo Van Belkom's Wolf Pack (published in 2004) is the first novel in Belkom's Wolf Pack series. It tells the story of Ranger Garrett Brock, who rescues a litter of wolf pups from incoming fire and brings them home. However, soon after Brock brings...

Miriam Towes' Women Talking (2018) is a novel about a series of rapes in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia. A group of men sprayed a veterinary sedative into women's homes around the colony, rendering them unconscious. After that, they broke...

The Lying Life of Adults is a novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante, which was first published in Italian in 2019 and later translated into English in a novel published in 2020. The book tells the story of Giovanna, a young girl from...

Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry (2022) is set in the 1960s. It follows Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who is struggling to integrate into a world that is not equal and dominated by men. Zott generally doesn't like dealing with other chemists, but...