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"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" is a poem by Edward Lear. It was originally published 1870 in Our Young Folks: an Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls. One year later Lear would republish the verse in his collection titled Nonsense Songs, Stories,...

John Keats was one of the most recognized poets of the early 18th century. Keats rose to the helm of English Romantic Poetry at an early age. Despite Keats’ premature death at the age of 25, he left a rich legacy in poetry as a “romantic poet.”...

At its core, Vernon Scannell's "Nettles" is a poem about the trials and tribulations of being a parent. Primarily, it is a poem about the way that parents protect their children throughout their lives in different ways. The poem is told from the...

Alfred E. Housman was born in 1859 in England. Housman grew up under his mother's tender care at the Perry Garden until age 12, when she died. While growing up, Housman developed a good relationship with the cherry tree outside their garden....

W.H. Auden was a British-American well-known for his poems on topics like morality, love, and, in the case of "Epitaph on a Tyrant," which was published in 1940, politics. "Epitaph on a Tyrant" is a poem creating the epitaph after the death of an...

"The Dong with a Luminous Nose" is a poem, which was first published in 1877 as a part of Victorian poet Edward Lear's collection titled Laughable Lyrics. Lear is best known for his nonsensical works of literature, but particularly his poems. "The...

Renowned English poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) was well-known for her lyrical and approachable poetry. Her poetry frequently addresses issues of faith, human relationships' intricacies, and personal experience. Her well-known poem "Absence"...

Australian author Tim Winton has had a life that few ever dream of. He details those experiences in The Boy Behind the Curtain, which was published in 2016 and chronicles his life from birth to the present day—and everything in between....

Arc of Justice is a non-fiction work published to great acclaim by Kevin Boyle in 2004. In telling the specific story of Ossian Sweet, the book shines a spotlight on the history of systemic racism in America's real estate superstructure. Boyle...

The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by critically celebrated British writer W. Somerset Maugham. The novel follows the life of Charles Strickland, a businessman who devotes the remainder of his life to painting in an effort to become a great artist....

"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, first published in 1897 before appearing in Yeats's 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. The poem describes Aengus—an Irish god of youth, poetry, and love—entering the...

The title page of the 1615 edition of Kyd's celebrated play reads:

The Spanish Tragedie:or, Hieronimo is mad againe.

In its day, The Spanish Tragedy was anonymous. Only in 1773 did the theatrical historian Thomas Hawkins discover, in Thomas...

Jason Reynolds's Ghost (2016) is a young-adult novel about Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw, a middle-schooler who joins a track team as a sprinter and develops greater behavioral discipline as he trains.

At twelve, Castle lives in an impoverished...

A Thousand Ships, which was first published in 2020, is author Natalie Haynes' retelling of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women who fought in it. The Trojan war, like all of the wars which preceded it and all of the wars which came...

Spare, Prince Harry's memoir (ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer, the critically acclaimed author of The Tender Bar) published to tremendous fanfare in early January 2023, was one of the most anticipated works of non-fiction in the past several...

Acclaimed screenwriting and author Monica Heisey's Really Good, Actually was published first in January 2023. It follows a young woman named Maggie, who is broke, recently divorced, and failing at her graduate school thesis. But she is only...

The title of Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, which was published in early 2023, is bound to attract attention. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is a mystery novel borrowed from the works of Agatha Christie,...

Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House was published in January of 2023. It is the follow-up to Hendrix's New York Times bestseller The Final Girl Support Group, which was published in 2021. How to Sell a Haunted House tells the story of a...

Kathryn Ma's The Chinese Groove was first published in late January 2023 by Counterpoint. It follows an eighteen-year-old boy named Shelley Zheng, whose family is reviled in her hometown Yunnan Province. He spends his days dreaming of a bigger and...

Our Share of Night is a novel by Mariana Enriquez, originally published in the author's native language, Spanish, in 2019. In October 2022, an English translation was published to spirited acclaim with tentative reservations. The reservations...

Nick and Charlie is author Alice Oseman's novella—first published in 2015 as an eBook and in 2020 as a paperback book—which continues the story of Nick and Charlie. At first glance, Nick and Charlie are the perfect couple: they are incredibly...

Author Alice Oseman is best known for two characters that she created: Charlie and Nick. Those characters (and other characters in Solitaire) were so compelling for potential publishers that a bidding war emerged for the right to publish Solitaire...

Lightlark, Alex Aster's novel for young adults, was initially published in late August 2022. As its title suggests, Lightlark is set on the island of Lightlark. Every 100 years like clockwork, Lightlark hosts what they call "Centennial." During...

Published in late 2022, author Jane Smiley's A Dangerous Business is set in the 1850s during the Gold Rush in California. Smiley's novel follows two prostitutes named Eliza and Jean who try to find their way in a state and country which is on the...