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The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is one of the most prominent pieces of sociological American literature, and one of the most important pieces of African-American literature. Previously published in Atlantic Monthly, the work is a...

Hayavadana is a 1971 play by Indian writer Girish Karnad. It tells the story of best friends Devadatta and Kapila, and their love, Padmini, as well as that of a man in the story with the face of a horse (the title of the okat means “one with a...

Published in 1819, The Vampyre is a novella of romantic, gothic, vampire fiction written by John William Polidori, a young physician who worked for the famous poet Lord Byron. In the novella, Aubrey, a young, wealthy orphan, watches his loved ones...

Directed by New Zealand-born Taika Waititi, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) tells the story of a young man named Ricky Baker, who gets sent to live with a couple named Hector and Bella Faulkner after exhausting nearly every other option for a...

The Rabbits is a 1999 picture book that depicts rabbits invading a country and displacing the indigenous marsupial population. An allegory for the British colonization of Australia, the story shows how the rabbits' and marsupials' initial...

Published in 2000, Fever 1793 is Laure Halse Anderson’s novel about an epidemic of yellow fever that struck the city of Philadelphia in 1793. The novel is a work of historical fiction: it features a blend of real events and historical figures with...

Whitman published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror, but it wasn't until years later that he decided to leave his career as a newspaper editor and become a full-time poet. Around 1850, he began to write what would become Leaves of...

"Story of Your Life" is an award-winning science fiction novella by acclaimed short story writer Ted Chiang. The approximately 50-page-long work was first published in 1998 in the second volume of the Starlight anthology. It was then reprinted in...

“Sunshine State” is a short story which is a part of the collection called “Everything Change an Anthology of Climate Fiction” written by Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson and published in 2016. The authors categorize the story in the so-called...

Introduction

The relationship between art and religion has been a topic of great interest and debate for centuries. In the context of Christianity, the discussion of art and its relationship to the Bible has been particularly significant. Francis...

Mansfield Park, considered the author's most ambitious novel, was published anonymously, as were all of Jane Austen's novels, in 1814. While Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are considered, as one critic remarks "the gay offsprings of...

Todd Strasser's "On the Bridge" is a short story about a teenage boy whose desire to be like his cool friend results in a violent confrontation that exposes the friend's cowardice and pathological lying.

While smoking his first cigarette on a...

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society....

In January 1993, Jon Krakauer published an article in Outside magazine about the death of Chris McCandless, a young Emory graduate who had donated all of his money to charity, gotten rid of all his belongings, changed his name, and, in April 1992,...

Born a Crime is the first book written by Trevor Noah, who is better known as a comedian and actor. The comedic memoir was first published in November 2016. It received mostly favorable critical reviews, and it also became a New York Times...

Gulliver's Travels, a misanthropic satire of humanity, was written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift. Like many other authors, Swift uses the journey as the backdrop for his satire. He invents a second author, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who narrates and...

Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and...

"The name is Great Expectations. I think a good name?" Dickens to his editor before he started publishing the novel.

When Dickens started his thirteenth novel , Great Expectations, in 1860, he was already a national hero. He had come from humble...

The Alice books were written during the Victorian era, a time now remembered for its stifling propriety and constrictive morals. Carroll had something of an outsider's perspective on this world; he was painfully shy, and he often stuttered. His...

The Alchemist is one of the most important literary phenomenons of the 20th century, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The book has been translated into over 67 languages and tops the all-time best-seller list in 18 countries. The...

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's first novel, published in 1813. Some scholars also consider it one of her most mature novels.

Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions in 1796, at the age of twenty-one. She...

John Steinbeck wrote The Pearl during the time in which he was at the height of his fame. He had completed The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was renowned and reviled as a subversive, unpatriotic man who...

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and...

Published in 1967 by Viking Press, The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first novel. The rivalry between the "greasers" and the "socs" was based on events in her own high school, the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton began writing the...