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When I Was Puerto Rican is a memoir by Esmeralda Santiago. It was published in 1993 by Da Capo Press. The book is the first of three books that Santiago wrote about her life. The other two, Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover, cover later...

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, the origins of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to ascertain. The play as we have it today comes from the First Folio of 1623. However, an earlier version of the play, entitled The Taming of a Shrew, was...

Seize the Day is a novella by acclaimed American novelist Saul Bellow, published in 1958. It captured the attention and respect of critics and scholars and has since been recognized as one of the essential texts in the canon of one of the...

Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complicated plays, tells the story of a mythic king of England, Cymbeline, who reigned during the first century A.D. Its several plots trace the tribulations of the King and his royal family on...

Patricia McCormick's Sold tells the story of Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, who is sold into the Indian sex slave trade. The novel, published in 2006, was inspired by Patricia McCormick's interviews with Indian and Nepalese sex...

The Merchant of Venice was first printed in 1600 in quarto, of which nineteen copies survive. This was followed by a 1619 printing, and later an inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. The play was written shortly after Christopher Marlowe's...

Henry V was probably the greatest military leader that England ever had. He laid claim to the French throne in 1414 by invoking an English royal claim, and managed to win the Battle of Agincourt the following year against seemingly impossible...

John Cheever's “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor” was initially published in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker on December 24, 1949. “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor” is a short story which the Christmas season, those who...

Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was published in book form in 1971 by Harper & Row. Prior to its publication as a novel, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was first published in McCall's. It follows a group of six misfit and...

Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World was originally published in 1968. It tells the story of Hafid, a poor camel boy that finds success and begins to live a life of abundance. Through charting Hafid's beginnings, his initial success,...

The Greatest Gift was written in 1943 and published in 1944 by author Philip Van Doren Stern. It tells the story of George Pratt, a depressed man who considers suicide. George makes a plan to commit the act and makes his way to a bridge. However,...

British author Raymond Briggs has written two Christmas classics: The Snowman and Father Christmas. The latter of those novels, Father Christmas, was originally published in 1973 by a small publishing house called Hamish Hamilton. It is, according...

“A Christmas Memory” was initially published in Mademoiselle, a woman's magazine, in 1956. Capote's short story was then reprinted in Capote's 1963 collection The Selected Writings of Truman Capote. Since then, it has been reprinted and...

For author John Grisham, the Christmas season is a foreign concept. Grisham is best known for his thrillers that are set in the legal system. Skipping Christmas, which was published in 2001, is a departure from Grisham's usual fare. Grisham's...

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, which was written by John Updike and illustrated by Edward Gorey, was first published in 1992 in the New Yorker magazine. The novella was subsequently published in book form in 1994 by Pomegranate Communications.

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Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express was first published in 1985. It tells the story of a young boy—who was inspired by the author's own childhood—who is one day welcomed aboard a magical train bound for the North Pole. The boy is promised that...

The Snowman is a picture book by English illustrator Raymond Briggs. It was published in 1978 by Random House. The book follows a boy building a snowman that comes alive at midnight. They play all night long, careful not to wake up the parents....

Alan Gratz is a fictional author, and he has made headlines with famous titles of his work, including Prisoner and War on Terror. The latest is The Code of Honor, a fictional novel set in Phoenix, Arizona, and is told from the third person...

“To an Athlete Dying Young” is one of the most famous poems by the English poet A. E. Housman. Houseman wrote at the tail end of the nineteenth century. He wrote poetry as a hobby, and his primary occupation was as a scholar of the classics, with...

Jennifer L. Holm's The Lion of Mars, which was published in early 2021, aims to tackle what life on Mars would be like for those that eventually come to live on the planet. The Lion of Mars is a work of fiction; it tells the story of a young man...

"The Widow's Might", author Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story originally published in Forerunner magazine in 1911, is about a widow named Mrs. McPherson. That widow, much to the shock of her three children, has been running her late husband's...

In 1977, Canadian author Margaret Atwood published Dancing Girls, which would be her first of many short story collections. In sum, that collection totaled 14 stories. And though "When It Happens" was not the best-known short story contained in...

Janet Frame's The Reservoir is a collection of short stories, sketches, poem fragments, and short-form memoirs. Each story in the collection is set in New Zealand, the country in which Frame was born.

Frame has long been fascinated with human...

Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom was initially published in 2020 by publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The novel follows a 28-year-old PhD candidate at Stanford University named Gifty. Though Gifty is an intelligent woman with a tremendous future ahead of...