“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...

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 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 Though unpublished in the author’s lifetime, it is now widely considered one of the crowning achievements of Victorian...

"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...

Tomorrow When the War Began was initially published 1993 by Pan Macmillan's Australian imprint. Marsden's second novel (but his first in quite a few years), Tomorrow When the War Began is described by the publisher as a "young adult invasion...

Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V., first published in 1963, introduces many of the recurring themes—from historical relativism to technological menace to recurring characters like Pig Bodine and Lieutenant Weissman—that will appear throughout...

“Pied Beauty” was written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877, but—like so much of his work—wasn’t published until 1918, 30 years after his death, as a part of the collection Poems, which was edited by his close friend Robert...

John Clare was born in 1793, in the English village of Helpstone to Parker and Ann Stimson Clare. His father was a field laborer, and both of his parents were essentially illiterate. Clare received some schooling and learned basic reading and...

The Boys from Biloxi is set to be released in October of 2022 and will be published by author John Grisham's longtime publisher, Doubleday.

The second of five children, John Grisham was born in February 2015 to Ronda and John Ray Grisham, a...

“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a poem about love by the English Romantic poet John Clare, written while he was an unwilling resident of Northampton Insane Asylum. Like all of Clare’s later work, it was never published during his lifetime, but...