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...

“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...

"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...

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...