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It would be fair to say that English author Thomas Hardy is best-known for his novels Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. However, Hardy also wrote a number of lesser known, but equally important, novels throughout his...

Camara Laye's The Dark Child is a 1953 French-language memoir about the author's childhood in Guinea. The son of a protective mother and a mystical-minded blacksmith and goldsmith father, Laye writes with affection about Malinke-Muslim traditions...

“To Penshurst” is a country-house poem by Ben Jonson addressed to Robert Sidney, Jonson’s patron. During the early modern period, many poets and artists were supported by a patron, who paid them in exchange for custom works addressed to that...

The Tempest first appeared in print as the first play in Shakespeare's 1623 Folio. It has been variously regarded as a highlight of Shakespeare's dramatic output, as a representation of the essence of human life, and as containing Shakespeare's...

"Leaf by Niggle" is a short fictional work, alternately called a short story and a novella, by acclaimed fantasy writer and Christian essayist J.R.R. Tolkien. The story was first published in the Dublin Review in January 1945, despite being...

Ling Ma's Severance was initially published in August 2018. Ma's novel follows a young woman named Candace Chen, a woman who works in an unfulfilling role selling Bible-related products. The novel follows Chen's life before a pandemic that is...

Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station was originally published in 2014. A graphic novel, Tokyo Ueno Station tells the story of a man named Kazu, who was born in 1933 in a town in Japan called Fukushima. Incidentally, Kazu was born in the same year as...

"The Death of a Government Clerk" is a short story by Anton Chekhov. It was first published in "Fragments" in 1883 with the subtitle "The Incident." It was later included in the collection "Motley Stories" in 1886.

The story details an incident...

“Song: to Celia” is one of the most famous love poems in the English language. It was written by the English poet Ben Jonson, who is otherwise best known for writing witty plays with complex plots. Jonson was born in London in 1572 and died in...

Michael Lewis's The Blind Side is a nonfiction book about the life and early sports career of Michael Oher, as well as the evolution of the game of football.

The book interweaves two stories. It chronicles Michael's journey from an impoverished...

Annie Ernaux's The Years was initially published in French in 2008. Despite being an autobiography, the book is told in third-person point of view. In the book, Ernaux chronicles her life from 1941 to 2006. It is simultaneously an exploration of...

“On my First Son” is one of many epitaphs, or short poems commemorating a death, written by the English poet Ben Jonson. Jonson was born in London around 1572 and lived until 1637. In that time, he became one of England’s most famous playwrights,...

Two Degrees is a young adult fiction novel written by bestselling American author Alan Gratz. It was published by Scholastic Inc. in October of 2022. Gratz tackles issues curbing humanity in our current times and historically. He focuses on...

The Door of No Return was initially published in September of 2022 by Little, Brown and Company. It follows an eleven-year-old named Kofi Offin, who has intense dreams of water and the Earth. Kofi often hears the call from the river from his...

Zitkala-Ša is best known as a writer, artist, educator, and political activist. A member of the Dakota tribe, Zitkala-Ša (also known by her married name Gertrude Simmons Bonn) wrote a number of works — the most popular of which is American Indian...

Ben Jonson's “On My First Daughter,” written after the death of his daughter in 1593, adapts the classical form of epitaph, or writing commemorating a dead person, to fit Jonson’s own situation. The decision to use such a generic style to remember...

The story of King Lear and his three daughters existed in some form up to four centuries before Shakespeare recorded his vision. Lear was a British King who reigned before the birth of Christ, allowing Shakespeare to place his play in a Pagan...

“The Windhover” is a sonnet written in 1887 and the best-known work of the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though unpublished in the author’s lifetime, it is now widely considered one of the crowning achievements of Victorian...

John Milton was an English poet and political thinker. Best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, a retelling of the story of creation and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, he was also a political revolutionary. His life spanned an...

"The Leash" by Ada Limón is a free-verse poem discussing how to resist despair, through the scene of the speaker walking her dog. The poem consists of one long stanza of thirty-three lines, with no consistent form of rhyme or meter. Limón blends...

A Mercy is Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, published in 2008. It is set in the late 17th century in colonial Virginia and explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in a lawless, raw new world.

When...

"Instructions on Not Giving Up" is a fourteen-line unrhymed poem about spring and resilience by 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Limón wrote the poem in one rush of inspiration, immediately after walking her dog through streets littered with...