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“First Kill” is a short story by Victoria “V.E.” Schwab which initially appeared in the vampire anthology titled Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with a Fresh Bite, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker. Schwab’s story brings the collection...

Written by Cuban-American author Maria Irene Fornes, Mud was first produced on the stage in 1983. Described by its author as "a play in 17 scenes," Mud tells the story of a girl named Mae who lives in a house with a man named Lloyd. Mae is in her...

Darling: New and Selected Poems is a collection of poems written by esteemed author Jackie Kay. There are a mix of brand-new poems (like "The Adoption Papers") and old poems that were never collected which are brought together in Darling. Each of...

“If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be For Nought” is an 1850 sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which a speaker begs her beloved to orient their feelings of love around permanent rather than fleeting features. Dismissing a series of attributes,...

This One Summer, the graphic novel written by Canadian author Mariko Tamaki, tells the story of the summer that two friends called Rose and Windy spent together in a small beach town called Awago. Rose, who is the narrator of the story, is dealing...

“Killing Mr. Griffin” is a novel written by Lois Duncan, and it falls into the genre of thriller mystery. The author, Lois Duncan, is recognized in the literary world as the leading author of the young adult fiction.

This particular novel follows...

Cat's Cradle, like many of Vonnegut's other novels, gets considerable mileage from irony and humor as it makes serious points about the state of the world and humanity. His tone is often light, but his words have a considerable bite. The novel is...

Set in an unnamed developing country, Andy Mulligan's Trash (2010) is a young-adult thriller novel about three boys whose lives change when they find in the garbage a bag linked to a murder and millions of stolen dollars. With corrupt police and...

"Education for Leisure" is a poem by the British writer Carol Ann Duffy, in which a delusional and violent speaker describes his plans to commit a murder. The work was originally published in Duffy's 1985 collection Standing Female Nude. Over the...

“War Photographer” initially appeared in Carol Ann Duffy’s first published collection of poetry, Standing Female Nude (1985). The poem depicts a photographer developing pictures he has taken in different war zones and reflecting on the pain and...

Beowulf is the first surviving epic written in the English language. The single existing copy of the manuscript dates from the late tenth century, although some scholars believe it dates from the first part of the eleventh century. It is found in...

Langston Hughes was an American poet and social activist, born and raised in Joplin, Mississippi. Langston Hughes was a prominent leader in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement in the 1920s that consisted of new African-American cultural...

"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" is a poem by William Carlos Williams about a widow mourning the loss of her husband. It was published in 1921. Williams was largely noted for his importance in the Modernism and Imagism movements. He sought to...

Robert Beatty is a prolific American novelist. Although Willa of the Wood is his fourth book - and the first in the eponymous Willa - it is without a doubt his most well-known work. A fantasy novel, Willa of the Wood tells the story of the young...

The Last Wild, the first book in author Piers Torday's trilogy entitled The Last Wild, tells the story of Kester Jaynes, a young boy who lives in a world where nearly every animal is extinct because of the so-called Red Eye virus. Kester has been...

Vanishing Girls is the first book in author Lisa Regan's "Detective Josie Quinn" series. This iteration follows Detective Quinn as she searches for Isabelle Coleman, a beautiful young blonde girl who suddenly goes missing one day. As she searches...

Cross Her Heart is the initial offering in what has come to be identified as the Bree Taggert series of novels by author Melinda Leigh. By the time the novel was originally published in March 2020, Leigh had already produced a number of volumes in...

"Little Red Cap" is a poem by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, originally published in her 1999 collection The World's Wife. The poem describes a young girl's romance with a menacing wolf, who seduces her by appealing to her love of poetry. Based on...

"This Is Just to Say," first published in 1934, is a poem by American author William Carlos Williams about a man who has eaten someone else's plums. Williams was a major poet commonly noted for his involvement with the Imagism and Modernism...

“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is a poem written in the second-person voice, describing a student's nostalgic memory of a beloved teacher. It is the second poem in Carol Ann Duffy’s 1990 collection The Other Country. In the poem, an adult speaker...

"The Red Wheelbarrow" is a poem by William Carlos Williams that uses a uniquely contemplative voice to depict a wheelbarrow. It was published in 1923 as part of his collection, Spring and All. Williams was a significant twentieth-century American...

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is Laila Lalami’s first novel, published in 2005.

Lalami had immigrated from Morocco and was working as a conceptual linguist in Los Angeles. She was “always hungry for news about Morocco,” and one day read about...

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is a poem by American writer William Carlos Williams about the Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting of the same name. It was published in 1960 in the Hudson Review and subsequently collected in Williams's final...

A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest" is a short story about two girls who leave London to escape Nazi bombings only to encounter a miserable, worm-like creature in a rural English forest. Decades later, the women have difficulty processing the...