Signal Fires, American author Dani Shapiro’s novel about one fateful night in 1985, was first published in October 2022. On that aforementioned fateful night, three teenagers begin to drink heavily. After they are finished drinking, one of the...

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland is an Irish author and journalist Fintan O'Toole's personal history of Ireland from 1958 to the modern day. O'Toole was born in Ireland in 1958 and witnessed the country change...

For Linda Villarosa, who is a regular contributor to the 1619 Project, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation (published in 2022) is personal. As an author and activist, Villarosa is deeply...

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published strangers to Ourselves in September 2022. Aviv's nonfiction book explores the relationship between culture, society, and how mental illness and how society treats the mentally ill. She does this by telling the...

Gitanjali (or "Song Offerings" in English) is Bengali author and poet Rabindranath Tagore's poetry collection, first published in Bengali in 1910 and in English in 1912. There are 156 or 157 poems in Gitanjali (scholars have not yet decided how...

Mia P. Manansala's debut novel Arsenic and Adobo was published in May 2021 and quickly gained critical acclaim. The story follows Lila Macapagal, a young woman who returns home to help save her aunt's failing Filipino restaurant after a painful...

Ed Yong has devoted his career to learning more and writing about the natural world—including humans and the animals that live inside of it. Yong's second book, called An Immense World (which was published in 2022), is about animal senses....

Carol Ann Duffy is one of Scotland's most acclaimed and widely read poets. She was also named poet laureate of the United Kingdom in 2009. Throughout her long and illustrious career, Duffy wrote countless poems and poetry collections. None,...

Fire & Blood is a fantasy book by author George R. R. Martin, first published in 2018. Written as a historical text within the world of Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice universe, the book chronicles the history of House Targaryen, the ruling...

Trust is a novel that was written by Hernan Diaz in 2022 and published by Riverhead Books. This book is about money, wealth, status, the role of women in this process, love and madness. That’s why The Washington Post and The New York Times called...

Namwali Serpell's The Furrows, which was published in September 2022, tells the story of Cassandra Williams and her brother, Wayne. One day, the two have an accident while together and Wayne disappears and presumably dies. His body, however, is...

To a Shade is a 1916 poem first published in W.B. Yeats's collection Responsibilities and Other Poems. In this twenty-six-line work, Yeats voices anger and resentment towards Dublin's middle classes on behalf of two historical figures: the late...

In many ways, Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which was initially published in March of 2022, is a difficult novel to describe and fully explain. It is a novel about self-discovery and a novel about dreams. It also tells the story of a young...

12 Angry Men has had a long history of production and revision, from short teleplay to major Broadway productions. Reginald Rose first found inspiration for 12 Angry Men when he served on a jury in a manslaughter case, over which the jurors fought...

The Grand Illusion (released as La Grande Illusion) is director Jean Renoir's French-language war film which was initially released in 1937. Renoir's film follows a group of French soldiers, led by Captain de Boeldieu and Lieutenant Maréchal, who...

"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, originally published in the 1893 collection The Rose. The poem features a speaker who addresses an unnamed listener in the second person. This speaker imagines the listener's future, and...

Pigeon English (2011) is author Stephen Kelman's debut novel. The text follows the story of Harrison "Harri" Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanaian immigrant who tries to solve the murder of a London boy. Kelman was inspired to write Pigeon English ...

English author Maria Louise Ramé, who operated and published the work under the pseudonym Ouida, published A Dog of Flanders in 1872. The novel is set in Antwerp, Belgium and follows a boy and his dog's adventures in the town. Nello, on one hand,...

Ada Limón was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, a home she would leave but look back fondly on during her poetic career. Limón's interest in creative writing grew at the University of Washington, where as an undergraduate she studied theatre in...

Colson Whitehead is one of the most acclaimed and awarded American writers at work today. To date, he has won the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a prestigious MacArthur Genius...