E. Lockhart's We Were Liars is a young-adult novel about Cadence Sinclair Eastman, a privileged teenager whose carefree summers at her grandfather's private island are disrupted by a traumatic accident she can't recall. After returning to the...

“Truth” is a short poem by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Often referred to as the father of English literature, Chaucer is best known today for The Canterbury Tales, a sequence of tales told by pilgrims fleeing the plague. However, during his...

“Prayer Before Birth” is a poem written by Irish poet Louis MacNeice in 1944, published as the first poem in his collection Springboard. In the poem, MacNeice expresses concerns about the ongoing conflict of World War II. "Prayer Before Birth"...

“A Country Doctor” was initially published in its original German in Franz Kafka’s collection of stories Ein Landartz: Kleine Erzählungen in 1919. An English translation first appeared in the 1945 in the volume The Country Doctor: A Collection of...

Simon the Cyrenian Speaks is a poem by American poet Countee Cullen about the titular speaker from the bible scripture. It originally appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse edited by Harriet Monroe in May 1924. Cullen nurtured the idea that Simon...

“Thoughts in a Zoo” is a poem composed by Countée Cullen. Cullen was one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, which is a comprehensive term covering a multitude of African American artists that came to prominence in the 1920s. Cullen...

Countee Cullen's life was wrought with hardship and pain from an early age. He was brought by who many historians consider to be his paternal grandmother to Harlem, New York at the age of nine. His grandmother raised him until he was 15 when she...

"A Brown Girl Dead" is a poem by Countee Cullen. Cullen's poem was initially written in 1923 and published in 1933.

Born in 1903, Countee Cullen was one of the most important voices in the 20th century and in the Harlem Renaissance, in which he...

Meera Syal’s 1996 debut novel, Anita and Me, is the coming-of-age story of nine-year-old Meena Kumar, a drama-seeking, pop-song-singing, slime-trail-extolling, British-Indian school girl.

In part inspired by Meera Syal’s upbringing in the West...

Published in 1999 in Great Britain by Indian author Anita Desai, the novel is set in two countries, India and the United States, and tells the story of a sister, Uma, and her brother, Arun. Uma, an unmarried woman, endeavors to eke out a life for...

“To Rosamond” is a love poem written by the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer is best known for his long-form poems, especially The Canterbury Tales. At three short stanzas, "To Rosamond" is strikingly brief in comparison. However,...

"Myth" is a poem by American author Natasha Trethewey that uses an unusual structure to retell the story of Orpheus. Originally published in 2006, the poem appeared as part of her collection Native Guard, which received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for...

Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame was written sometime between 1374 and 1385, making it one of Chaucer's earliest works. Written in Middle English, The House of Fame is over 2,000 lines long and tells the story of an unnamed poet who one day...

"Incident" is a poem by America writer Natasha Trethewey that recounts an unsettling story told by a family every year. The poem was originally published as part of her 2006 collection, Native Guard, which went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for...

“Native Guard” is a sonnet sequence by American poet Natasha Trethewey about a member of the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first Black regiments to serve in the U.S. military. The poem is from her collection of the same name, Native Guard,...

Told from a first person point of view, author Henry James' The Figure in the Carpet was published in 1896 and tells the story of a man (the unnamed narrator, who is a literary critic for a local newspaper), who meets his favorite author and pours...

Henry James wrote The Wings of the Dove in 1902. It is a novel centered around the life of heiress Milly Theale, and the way in which those around her behave when she becomes seriously ill. It is a study in human motivation, as some of Milly's...

The Europeans is a satirical short novel by American author Henry James. Initially published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, it was later published as a novel in 1878 by Macmillan Publishers and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The novel is a comedic...

The Bostonians is a satirical novel by American author Henry James initially published serially in The Century Magazine, it was later published in 1886 as a book by Macmillan Publishers. The novel tells a melancholy seriocomedy surrounding Basil...

Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is a historical fiction novel written by American-British author Henry James. The novel explores the politics of marriage including secrets, unsaid grievances, and expectations. It has a film adaptation with the...

The Plot is a mystery thriller novel written by American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. It was published by Celadon Books in May 2021. The book is Korelitz’s seventh novel and made it on the New York Times Bestseller list and The Tonight Show...