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Dear Martin, published in 2017, is a novel about 17-year-old Justyce, who, after being racially profiled by a police officer, grapples with questions of police brutality and systemic racism. As he finishes his senior year, Justyce reflects on his...

Paul Laurence Dunbar published “We Wear the Mask,” one of his most celebrated poems to this day, in 1895 as part of his second collection of verse, titled Majors and Minors.

A publication that contributed to the publicity of Majors and Minors, as...

The Wild Duck (Vildanden in Norwegian) is a play by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1884 while he was living abroad in Italy, the process of writing the play initially did not go smoothly for Ibsen, largely due to the political...

The House That Jack Built is a psychological horror art film directed by Lars von Trier, and was released on 14 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival. The film stars a large ensemble cast, including notable actors Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, and...

The Lodger and Other Stories is a collection of stories written by Svava Jakobsdottir, an Icelandic author who is known for her use of magical realism, and her exploration of Icelandic culture. She specifically explores the shift the country has...

"Desiderata" is a prose-poem written in the early 1920s by writer Max Ehrman. Although it wasn't particularly well-known at the time, it gained popularity thanks to recordings in the 1960s and 1970s and is now known as an inspiring poem promoting...

The Heat of the Day is a novel written by Irish-British author, Elizabeth Bowen. The book was released in the United Kingdom in 1948. It was preceded by The Death of the Heart (1938), and followed on by A World of Love (1955).

The book follows on...

The Collected Short Stories is a collection of 49 short stories written by Satyajit Ray. Originally published in the native Bengali language in the 1960s, the collection has since been translated by Gopa Majumdar. He did an excellent job at...

Originally published in Arabic in 1964, Tayeb Salih's short story "A Handful of Dates" is about a young Sudanese boy whose loyalty to his grandfather is tested when his grandfather delights in their neighbor's financial ruin. After learning the...

Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) is the most recent poetry collection by American poet Louise Glück. Glück has said that, just before writing the poems in the collection, she was reading a lot of prose—and specifically, a lot of Iris Murdoch,...

The Czar’s Spy, often subtitled The Mystery of a Silent Love is a thriller/mystery novel written by Anglo-French journalist and author William Tufnell Le Queux, and published in 1905.

Le Queux was born on 2 July 1864 in London, UK. He had a range...

Favel Parrett's 2011 novel Past the Shallows is about two brothers, Harry and Miles, who in the wake of their mother's and uncle's deaths must live with their abusive father while repressing memories that threaten to reveal the truth of how their...

Thought to be one of Selma Lagerlöf's earliest works, "The Rat Trap" is a short story that was likely written in the 1880s, before excerpts of Lagerlöf's first novel Gösta Berling's Saga were published in a Swedish weekly publication. The story...

Louise Erdrich's novel The Night Watchman is not just close to her heart because she wrote it; it tells the story of her Native American ancestors who, in the early 1950s, fought against a congressional bill that, in an Orwellian turn of phrase,...

Benjamin Zephaniah is a British Jamaican poet known for his dub poetry and anti-empire stance. Having grown up in Birmingham to an underprivileged neighbourhood of predominantly fellow Jamaicans, Zephaniah struggled a lot, academically, throughout...

Isobel Dixon is a British South African poet, who was acclaimed for her poetry during the early 2000s. Presently, she has permanently relocated to Cambridge, England and often uses the stark contrast between her birth country and the United...

Sujata Bhatt is a well-known poet across India, America, and Europe. Being an Indian-born writer, most of her poems are preoccupied with cultural identity. Bhatt has also written several poems touching the theme of immigration and belonging. This...

Poems and Fancies is a work by Margaret Cavendish, where she explores natural, science, and mathematical philosophy. Cavendish released these poems when politics and war were ravaging most parts of Britain. The poetry reveals a fidgety and...

Louise Erdrich gives the story of Fleur Pillager, a young woman who embarks on a journey to the city to avenge the stealing of her land. Pillager makes her way to the home of James Mauser, the suspected thief. Before leaving for the city, she...

Nadine Gordimer once again tackled the issue of apartheid in South Africa through metaphor and symbolism in her short story “Once Upon a Time.” First published in a shorter version in 1988 in the Weekly Mail, the standard full-length tale appeared...

"The Good-Morrow" is a 1633 poem by English poet John Donne. The poem was originally published in his collection Songs and Sonnets, and Donne himself considered it a sonnet, despite the fact that it doesn’t conform to the standard number of lines,...

Set during South African apartheid, The Island is a play that Athol Fugard co-wrote with two writers and actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, both Black South Africans. The three men met when they were members of a drama group called the Serpent...

It is more than reasonable to say that Chretien de Troyes is one of the best-known Medieval authors (he is thought to have created the character of Lancelot). And Perceval, the Story of the Grail was supposed to be his fifth verse. Alas, the verse...

"Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" is a short story by American writer John Updike, about a man telling his daughter a bedtime story, and in the process revealing the dynamics of their own family life. First published in The New Yorker on June 13th, 1959,...