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Although she is best known for her novels, Ann Beattie has written dozens of short stories. Some of those stories are collected in Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories (originally published in 1976, but reissued in 2002). Many of the people in...

In his book The Color of Law, author and historian Richard Rothstein makes the case that the modern American metropolis was created with deliberate, de jure segregation, with the help of things including racial zoning, redlining, and a phenomenon...

Isabel Wilkerson's debut book The Warmth of Other Suns (published in 2010) is a study of the first two Great Migrations in the United States, which saw millions of African Americans migrate from Southern to Northern States from 1915 to 1970 (the...

As its title suggests, Stamped from the Beginning is a book about racism. Particularly, the book is about how racism was deeply ingrained in America: how racism and racist ideas were created, how they spread, and how they took roots in American...

Japanese author Yoko Ogawa was inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and George Orwell (particularly his book 1984) in writing her science fiction novel The Memory Police (published in Japanese in 1994; published in English in 2019), which tells...

In her English-language debut, Mexican author Fernanda Melchor tells the story of a young girl in sixth grade named Fig, who so desperately wants to understand her mentally ill father. Drawing from books about acclaimed artist Vincent Van Gogh,...

In her debut novel entitled Conversations with Friends (2017), Irish author Sally Rooney tells the story of two female college students who start a rather strange and unorthodox relationship they start with a seemingly happily married couple. Both...

Written by Chilean author Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives tells the story of the search for a Mexican poet from the 1920s called Cesárea Tinajero. The novel is set in the late 1970s and chronicles two Latin poets' search for the Tinajero...

In Circe (2018), American author Madeline Miller tells the story of Homer's The Odyssey from the point of view of the eponymous Circe. Although Circe is a relatively strange and abnormal child - she's neither pretty like her mother nor powerful...

In what is one of his many children's books, British writer Roald Dahl's George's Marvelous Medicine (1981) tells, as the book's title suggests, George's story. Specifically, the book follows George as he has to deal with his cantankerous and...

Over the course of his long and illustrious career, British author Roald Dahl wrote approximately two dozen books. Among those books was The Twits (1979), which is one of Dahl's many children's books. It follows a couple called Mr. and Mrs Twit,...

John Cheever's “The Five-Forty-Eight” was first published on April 10, 1954 in The New Yorker. Four years later, the story was reprinted as part of a collection of Cheever's short stories, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. The short story examines...

Existentialism Is a Humanism is a piece of literature published in 1946 and produced by Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. It was based on his famous lecture given at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29...

Written by Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics (originally published in 1677) is a philosophical treatise which covers and attempts to apply the method of Euclid. In that vein, de Spinoza discusses issues like the nature of God, how man's mind works,...

The birth of James Joyce on February 2, 1882 was perfectly timed to introduce him to the literary world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Joyce would go on to dominate century by writing what is routinely voted its greatest novel, Ulysses. In...

Although The Old Curiosity Shop is one of Charles Dickens' least-known novels, it is certainly one of his most interesting. The Old Curiosity Shop follows Little Nell Trent, who lives with his grandfather in - as the title suggests - an old...

In his seminal work The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America, author and acclaimed historian James T. Patterson argues that it was the year 1965 - not 1968 or 1969 as many others have suggested - that marked a turning point in America....

Although she was perhaps best-known for her novels (the most famous of which are The Stone Carvers and The Underpainter), Canadian author Jane Urquhart has written countless short stories. Urquhart's best and most-famous works were collected in a...

Son of the Revolution (originally published in 1984) is author Liang Heng's autobiography which chronicles his life - primarily his childhood and young adulthood - in Mao Zedong's China during his so-called Cultural Revolution. In the book, Heng...

Cormac McCarthy's 2005 neo-Western novel No Country for Old Men received mixed critical reception upon its release. Critics couldn't determine how much of the novel, particularly the character of Sheriff Bell, was meant in earnest and how much of...

In her collection of eight short stories entitled Vampires in the Lemon Grove, author Karen Russell writes of fascinating people and their equally interesting stories. One story, for example, follows a community of girls who are held captive in a...

In her collection of feminist poems entitled The Octopus Museum, author Brenda Shaugnessy discusses complex and relevant themes through the lens of a dystopian future in which octopuses reign supreme. Humans, on the other hand, are no longer the...

Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written collaboratively by W.B Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901, is a play centered around the 1798 Irish Rebellion. In the early 20th century, Ireland was still under colonial rule, and many longed for an independent Irish...

Perhaps the most well-received of T.S. Eliot’s seven plays, The Cocktail Party interpolates many essential elements from Alcestis by Euripides into a midcentury British play that takes many genre cues from British "drawing-room comedies." The play...