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"Hope" is a poem by British writer Emily Brontë about perseverance and adversity. Originally published in 1846, the poem personifies hope as the speaker describes its effect on her.

Brontë was born in the small village of Thornton, just outside of...

The author John Knowles, like his narrator Gene, was from the south (West Virginia, to be exact), and sent off to an uppercrust boarding school in New England for polish before university. However, unlike Gene, Knowles was no academic whiz at...

"On the Pulse of Morning" is a poem written and performed by Maya Angelou as part of the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. The poem is a call to recognize America’s history of slavery and racism, as well as the catastrophic...

"No Coward Soul Is Mine" is a poem written by author Emily Brontë about faith and bravery. Published in 1846, the poem appeared as part of a collection that Brontë put together with her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, called Poems of Currer, Ellis,...

"Remembrance" is a poem written by British author Emily Brontë that deals with memory and grief. It was published in 1846. Brontë is best known for her work as a fiction writer, particularly for her seminal novel, Wuthering Heights, which is...

Family (家 Jia) is the first installment of the Turbulent Stream trilogy (激流三部曲 Jili Sanbuqu), by Ba Jin. Before being published as a novel in 1933, Family was serialized in 1931-1932. It was Ba Jin's first novel-length work. The second and third...

Julian Barnes's The Sense of An Ending is a novel about a middle-aged man coming to terms with how a cruel letter he wrote as a young man precipitated the suicide of a close friend. The book won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Retired arts...

“Love Armed” is not an independent, standalone poem, but actually a poetic song that Aphra Behn freqeuently inserted into another type of writing at which she excelled: stage drama. “Love Armed” is a song that was originally conceived for the only...

Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, commonly referred to now simply as Epicene, is a comedy by early modern English playwright Ben Jonson. It was originally performed in 1609 by The Blackfriars Children but did not become popular until many years later,...

It is not a typo when you see the name of this author appear as bell hooks. The lack of capitalization of her name is a conscious choice intended, at one level, to be a statement consistent with her status as social critic. She is a writer famous...

True Biz is a novel published in March, 2022 by Sara Nović. It is the follow-up to her debut novel Girl at War published in 2015. With her other life as a noted activist for the rights of the deaf and hearing-impaired, it should come as little...

In many ways, this collection of short stories by Indonesian author Budi Darma is exactly what it says on the can - a book that tells the tale of people living in the Midwest college town of Bloomington, Indiana. The collection is set in the 1970s...

Negroland is a memoir by American writer Margo Jefferson. It was published in 2015 by Pantheon Books. Margo was born in 1947 in an affluent African-American neighborhood, to a pediatrician father and socialite mother. They made it possible for her...

The Splendid and the Vile is a non-fiction portrait of Winston Churchill during the first months of his term as British Prime Minister. Churchill stepped into this role during the most troubling of times in European history; his first day in...

“River of the Gods” is a nonfiction book by Candice Millard that focuses on the European frenzy surrounding the Orientalism of the 19th century and the culture of Egypt in particular. The prologue of the book itself is titled Obsession, and it...

Keri Blakinger's memoir Corrections in Ink chronicles the author's journey from her life of acclaim in the ice rink to her less desirable and sad life of addiction, crime, and a prison sentence. While in prison, Blakinger grappled with the...

One day, a man called Owen Michaels disappears. Before he disappears, however, he manages to sneak his wife a note that reads "protect her." While she is perplexed, Owen's wife becomes clear that Owen's note refers to his daughter, Bailey. The...

"Felix Randal" is a poem written by British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1880, first published posthumously in 1918. Partly inspired by Hopkin’s own experience as a Jesuit priest, the poem shows a priest (thought to be Hopkins himself)...

Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is one of the seminal works of literature written by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born in 1977). It chronicles the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, depicting a politically charged climate. In...

Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) was an American writer commonly associated with the group known as the Black Mountain Poets. He is now widely recognized as one of the most influential poets of the last half-century. He was known for his compressed...

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a Puerto Rican-American poet whose work was central to the Imagism and Modernism movements. He operated in a variety of registers, from plainspoken to lyrical to darkly sardonic, but was always concerned...

"To the Memory of Mr. Oldham" is a 1684 poem by the English satirist John Dryden, elegizing the fellow poet John Oldham, who died in 1683. Dryden and Oldham were socially acquainted, making the poem both a tribute to Dryden's departed friend and a...

“I Know a Man” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley that deals with the problem of finding meaning in contemporary life. First published in 1955, it later appeared as part of his 1991 collection, Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Creeley...

“Heroes” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley about the afterlife of myths and legends. The poem first appeared in his 1960 collection For Love: Poems, 1950–1960, and was republished in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975....