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British author Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices was published by Collins in 1980. It is set during the height of the Blitz in 1940, when the Nazi Luftwaffe (or German Air Force), battered the United Kingdom nightly with different kinds of bombs....

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a film about the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial France in the 1950s. Shot in documentary style with a cast of non-professional actors, the film depicts the guerrila attacks of...

Firekeeper's Daughter was published in March 2021 by Henry Holt and Co. It was written by Native American author and activist Angeline Boulley, who has spent most of her life devoted to improving the lives and education of Native American people....

"B. Wordsworth" is Trinidadian-British author V.S. Naipaul's short story first published in 1959 in his acclaimed collection entitled Miguel Street. The short story is told from Naipaul's point of view, and explores his relationship (in the story,...

It would be fair to say that Ralph Ellison is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man (not to be confused with H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man). Some historians have called "The Black Ball," one of author Ralph Ellison's most...

"At Hiruharama" is acclaimed English author Penelope Fitzgerald's short story first published as a part of her short story collection entitled The Means of Escape, which was first published in 2000, when Fitzgerald was 84. Fitzgerald's short story...

“Barn Owl” (1969) is the first part of a two-part poem (a “diptych”) by Gwen Harwood, called “Father and Child.” As the name of the diptych indicates, “Father and Child” explores the relationship between a child and her father. In “Barn Owl,” the...

Crying in H Mart is a memoir by author and singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner. It recounts her relationship with her mother, particularly as it relates to food and Korean culture.

The memoir examines Zauner's close relationship with her mother,...

Shakespeare's principal source for the story of Coriolanus is a history written by Plutarch, of a Coriolanus who supposedly lived in ancient Rome. Shared with this source material is a concern for the overlap between virtue and valour; whereas, in...

X: A Fabulous Child's Story is author Lois Gould's 1972 short story (which was later adapted into a picture book in 1978). It tells the story of the eponymous child called X, who is raised by their parents as part of an experiment which allows...

"September 1913" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written on the occasion of the 1913 Dublin lock-out dispute between Dublin's workers and the merchants and shopkeepers who made up the city's...

"The End of Poetry" is the final poem in Ada Limón's sixth book, The Hurting Kind (2022). Limón, considered "one of America's preeminent poets" by Publishers Weekly and named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, takes an ironic approach in this poem:...

The Drought was initially published in 1964 as The Burning World. It was retitled as The Drought and published by Berkley Books in 1965. In the early 1960s, at the start of his career, author J.G. Ballard wrote a series of science fiction novels....

Memory of Water is Finnish novelist Emmi Itäranta's debut novel, published in 2014 by HarperCollins. Itäranta's novel is set in a dystopian future in which water has become scarce because of climate change caused by humanity. As a result of the...

The Inheritance of Loss is author Kiran Desai's second novel, published in 2006 by Atlantic Monthly Press and Hamish Hamilton. The Inheritance of Loss won numerous accolades, including the 2006 Booker Prize, the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award,...

Les Belles-Soeurs is a two-act play by Canadian writer Michael Tremblay. Written in a naturalistic style, the story follows one night in the home of Germaine Lauzon, a housewife who is hosting a small get-together. The course of the evening...

Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed was published in 1974 to great acclaim; it is considered a landmark work of social history and a core part of the extensive body of work on the Salem Witch Trials. They root the...

Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist was initially published by Simon and Schuster in September 2009. A horror novel written for young adults, Yancey's novel is presented as entries in the diary of a young man and orphan named Will Henry, the...

Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) is a silent film about Chaplin's iconic Tramp character raising a child he finds abandoned. Chaplin wrote, produced, and starred in the film, which was his feature-length directorial debut.

The film begins with a...

Jerry Craft's New Kid is a graphic novel about a Black seventh grader who struggles to adjust to the upscale, mostly white private school in which his mother has enrolled him. New Kid made headlines in 2021 when a Texas school district pulled the...

Burnt Shadows is a novel by Pakistani-British novelist Kamila Shamsie. Published in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing, the novel follows two families over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Set in World War II, the partition of...

Just Cause, published in 1992, is a psychological and legal thriller written by American author and former journalist John Katzenbach. Known for his intense character-driven plots and moral complexity, Katzenbach creates stories that explore the...

Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances is science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

The Chairs is an absurdist play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, first performed in 1952. It details the life of an unnamed, elderly married couple as they attempt to organize a speech and look back on their life together.

The play...