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In 1839, the first collection of poems by W. B. Yeats was published, taking its name from the last epic-style poem that Yeats ever wrote. The collection also included a number of poems that would be republished as one longer poem that Yeats...

Sherman Alexie's memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a mournful, harrowing book written after the death of his mother at the age of 78, with whom he had a complicated but loving relationship. Through 78 poems, 78 essays, and countless...

There are lots of ways in which a first-time novelist can attain prominence. They can make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list; they can receive rave reviews from literary critics, or, like American author David Wroblewski, they...

First published in 1944, Eleanor Estes's classic children's book The Hundred Dresses is about the remorse a young girl experiences after she stands by while her best friend teases an impoverished classmate who claims to own one hundred dresses.

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Indian author Prajwal Parajuly is particularly well-known for his writings about Nepali speaking people and their culture. The Ghurkha's Daughter is a collection of short stories that dramatize the experiences of the Nepalese people both living in...

Coraline is the first children's novella by British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. The novel takes its name from the story's young, female protagonist. After moving to a new home, Coraline acquaints herself with her eccentric neighbors and explores...

Indian-American author Karan Mahajan's second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, opens with a narrative about the detonation of a bomb in a New Delhi marketplace in 1996, by one of the protagonists, Shockie, a man from Kashmir. The bomb kills...

If given the opportunity to name the top ten most important -- yet controversial -- books, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) would invariably appear on any given list. At its core, Orientalism is a study of, as the title suggests, orientalism. In...

Of the various books that Phillip K. Dick published over the course of his long and illustrious career, 1957's Eye in the Sky is among his lesser-known works. It tells the story of Jack Hamilton, the primary character in the book, and seven other...

At its core, C.S. Lewis' is an allegory. It tells the story of a bus ride from hell to heaven. In the book, Lewis meditates on a number of topics, including: Christianity, good and evil, the Bible, judgment, damnation, and, naturally, heaven and...

Whale Rider, the 2002 film directed by Niki Caro and starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, tells the story of Castle-Hughes' Kahu Paikea Apirana, a twelve year old Maori girl with a big heart -- and even bigger dreams. Ultimately, she wants to become the...

Vertigo is one of Alfred Hitchcock's best-known films, a 1958 psychological thriller based on the 1954 novel by the French writing team Boileau-Narcejac, D'entre les morts. It was shot in San Francisco and employs several different camera...

The winner of second prize in the prestigious O. Henry Awards for the year 1941 was a short story written by a relative newcomer to the world of American fiction, a woman straight out of William Faulkner’s backyard. That woman was Eudora Welty and...

“After great pain…” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous and widely read poems, and one that has inspired a good deal of critical commentary and controversy. Because of Dickinson's notoriously private and reclusive nature, the poem’s apparent...

First published in the April 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, O. Henry's “A Retrieved Reformation” is about a notorious safecracker named Jimmy Valentine who gives up his life of crime after he falls in love with a banker's daughter.

O. Henry...

At Makerere University College in 1960, while being in his second preliminary year, Ngugi wa Thiong'o approached Jonathan Kariara, who was in his final year as a student of English and involved in a university journal called Penpoint. Ngugi wa...

Adapted from the critically-acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men (released in 2007), tells the story of a man named Llewyn Moss, who one day stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and nearly $2,000,000 in cash....

Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) is an ambitious, profound novel with an urgent environmental message. Spanning multiple time periods and including numerous narrators, it tells the story of a group of activists who are called to protect the...

“Incident” is one of the most famous poems from Countee Cullen’s first and most famous poetry collections: Color (1925). Cullen was a rather traditional poet. His main influence was the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet John Keats. He was...

The Pianist is a 2002 film by Roman Polanski based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival during the German occupation of Warsaw in 1942. It was directed by Roman Polanski and written by Ronald Harwood, and it met with widespread...

Hamilton is an acclaimed musical that follows the life and exploits of an oft-overlooked Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton. Using innovative musical and theatrical methods, the musical takes the audience through the biography of the impassioned...

First published in 1938, set amid the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, "The Lamp at Noon" is a short story about how a young homesteader couple's competing visions of a better life lead to the death of their son.

The desolate, dust-filled...

Written in 1974 during the politically-charged second-wave feminist movement, which began in the 1960s as a movement to increase women’s equality, Adrienne Rich's poem “Power” was clearly a political statement. Rich was heavily involved in the...

Cal is a 1983 novel by the Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty. It is a story situated during one of the most difficult periods in Irish history, the time known as "the Troubles," when Northern Ireland was divided between Loyalist and...