John Dryden (1631-1700) was one of seventeenth-century England's best-known writers. Known for poetry, prose, drama, criticism, and translation, Dryden today remains beloved as a writer of satire in particular. He is also remembered for developing...

"How to Triumph Like a Girl" is the opening poem from Ada Limón's 2015 book Bright Dead Things. The poem is a celebration of female triumph as the speaker finds kinship between her body and the wild, animal power of racehorses. In the years...

Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Dr. Seuss wrote more classic books than perhaps any other children's author. Among those classic books is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which tells the story of the eponymous Grinch, a mean and...

San Andreas (2015) is a natural-disaster thriller about a search-and-rescue pilot who saves his daughter and reconciles with his ex-wife amid the chaos of the world's most destructive earthquake as it strikes the West Coast of the United States....

Gail Giles' Shattering Glass was initially published by Roaring Book Press in 2001. The novel is set over the course of one school year and is told from the perspective of a high school senior named Young Stewart, who is a member of the "in crowd"...

Italian director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (or "The Sweet Life") was released in 1960. Set across seven days and nights and in Rome, Italy, La Dolce Vita follows a young man named Marcello Rubini. Disillusioned with his life, Marcello walks...

“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is a characteristically witty poem by the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in 1859, and wrote most of his poetry in the late nineteenth century. Although today he is best known for his poetry,...

Carpentaria is a 2006 novel by Alexis Wright about the tortured relations between white settlers and the Aboriginal Black community in the remote mudflats of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Queensland, Australia. The novel centers around...

Ada Limón's poem "Wife" appears in her 2018 book, The Carrying. The speaker reflects on her lingering discomforts with the word, "wife," and how it implies a restrictive domestic role and rigid archetype. She expressed her distaste for and...

First published in 1988, The Devil's Arithmetic is a historical fiction novel by Jane Yolen. The story revolves around Hannah Stern, a Jewish girl living in New Rochelle, New York. Tired of hearing her older relatives talk about the past,...

T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is a fantasy novel about Wart, a fatherless young boy who is mentored by the wizard Merlyn and has various adventures that prepare him to become king. First published in 1938, it is the first book in White's The...

Jason Reynolds' Long Way Down is a 2017 young-adult novel about a fifteen-year-old who sets out to avenge his brother's fatal shooting and encounters several ghosts who make him question his resolve.

Written in verse and narrated by Will Holloman,...

Ada Limón's poem "Dead Stars" was published in her 2018 book The Carrying. In it, the speaker observes stars in the night sky, thinks about the idea that humans are comprised of stardust, and imagines how people might rise to their full potential...

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...

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,...