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Most likely written in 1579, but not published until 1595, Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy is a new response to an old charge against the legitimacy of poetry, one that had been leveled against the literary arts at least since Plato in The...

No Sugar is a play written by Jack Davis, published in 1986. It takes place during the Great Depression in Western Australia and follows an Aboriginal family, the Millimuras, as they navigate life on corrupt reservations and contend with the...

First published in the Japanese literary publication Shinchō in January 1922, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove" (or "In a Bamboo Grove") is about a young samurai killed in mysterious circumstances. Pieced together from contradictory...

"In Those Years" is the second poem in Adrienne Rich's Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995). Written after the end of the Reagan presidency, this poem appears in a section of the book entitled "What Kind of Times Are These." It thus...

Invictus is a film from 2009 directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Anthony Peckham about the improvement of the South African Springboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup, which took place during the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Mandela had a...

David Malouf's Ransom (2009) is a profound novel of immense suffering, sorrow, and redemption.

It retells the story of Homer's Iliad from books 22 to 24. While the Iliad covers the entirety of the last year of the Trojan War, a famous conflict in...

"On Fairy-Stories" is a critical essay by J.R.R. Tolkien, the acclaimed author of The Lord of the Rings. The essay was published in its final form in the collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams from Oxford University Press in 1947, but the...

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that was first published in 1946. Kazantzakis is a Cretan author who is considered one of the most influential modern Greek writers in history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in...

When it was released in 1999, The Freedom Writers Diary was met with critical acclaim and financial success -- but it was not released without controversy. In 2008, a teacher was suspended for a year and a half without pay for teaching the book...

Widely believed to be Terence Rattigan's best work, The Browning Version was first performed on September 8 1948, at the historic Phoenix Theater in London. The play is set in a private school for boys; one of the main characters, Classical...

Stephen Hawking's goal in writing A Brief History of Time (first published in 1988) was to write an easily accessible book for layman with little or no prior scientific knowledge. The book introduces readers to ideas like the creation and...

There are two main characters in Sebastian Faulks' fourth novel, Birdsong, and they share a plot line that is separated by sixty years. The story follows the life of Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in France during World War...

Deadly, unna? is Philip Gwynne's debut novel, and like Spring, he came onto the teen literary scene like a lion. He sets the story in his native Australia against a background of interracial difficulties and friendships that are possible through a...

First published in the London Mercury in 1921, The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a short story by Katherine Mansfield that was later re-printed in a compendium of her work entitled The Garden Party and Other Stories. It tells the story of two...

A Different Mirror is a retelling of the history of the United States of America written by academic, historian, author and ethnographer Ronald Takiki. The book was published June 1st 1994 by Back Bay Books, though it was first published in 1993....

The Distance Between Us is a coming of age novel written by Kasie West. It follows a girl named Caymen Meyes as she meets a guy she likes. It spans over 320 pages and was published on July 2nd, 2013 by Harper Teen. It has been translated into...

In a very symbolic, but also rather literal way, Mark Twain was engaging in a bit of gold prospecting himself when he penned “The Californian’s Tale.” While Twain seemed to have an unerring knack for putting his finger directly on the pulse of...

Although Canadian author Margaret Atwood is best-known for writing the book The Handmaid's Tale, she is the author of a number of very well-respected novels. Among them is Cat's Eye, which released after The Handmaid's Tale.

When writing Cat's...

Melton Mclaurin references an enormous number of historical events in his book Celia, A Slave, which tells the story of slavery through the eyes of a female slave. The book is based on the trial of Celia, slave girl to Robert Newsome, who was...

Written in 1904, "The Cop and the Anthem" is a short story by O. Henry, an American author who wrote under this famous pen name; born William Sydney Porter, his stories became known for the surprise twist at the end, and for being set in New York...

Crow Country is a 2011 children's fantasy-mystery novel by Australian author Kate Constable. It won the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Young Readers and the Patricia Wrightson Award for Children's Literature at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon is one of the latest additions to one of America’s oldest original literary genres, the slave narrative. This genre stretches from those published before the off-anthologized Interesting Narrative of the Life of...

Released in 2016, Behold the Dreamers is author Imbolo Mbue's debut novel. It tells the story of a young man named Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Cameroon. After looking for a while for a job, Jende gets a prestigious job for a Lehman Brothers...

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was also the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category. The honor was a culmination of her trajectory...