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Twelfth Night is one of the most commonly performed Shakesperean comedies, and was also successful during Shakespeare's lifetime. The first surviving account of the play's performance comes from a diary entry written early in 1602, talking about...

Published mainly in the 1830s and 1840s, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have come to represent the height of 19th-century tales of the macabre. One of the American Romantics, Poe showed an interest in the power of emotions and often sought to...

Cervantes is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. Often, Cervantes is compared to Shakespeare. Both men have become "national literary treasures" glowing during "golden ages" of literature. Cervantes was writing along aside a number...

The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serialized novel in Collier's Weekly. Robert J. Collier, whose father had founded the magazine, had just become editor. At the time, James was already a well-known author, having already...

Emily Dickinson wrote close to 1800 poems in her lifetime. Her poems are often extremely short, waste no words, and subvert the traditional forms of the day. She is also fond of the dash as a tool to signify a pause or provide emphasis. Her poems,...

"Filling Station" is a poem by the twentieth-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. First published in her 1965 collection Questions of Travel, the work mines questions of love, kinship, and connection. It takes place at a filling station (i.e....

The Summer I Turned Pretty is a young-adult romance novel written by American author Jenny Han. It was published by Simon & Schuster in 2009 and it is the first book in The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy. The trilogy includes the sequels It’s...

Andrew Waterhouse was a British poet and environmentalist whose work dealt with relationships, emotions, and the natural world. His poem "Climbing My Grandfather," originally published in his 2000 collection In, uses an extended metaphor about...

Ruth Sepetys' I Must Betray You is a historical thriller set in communist Romania during the late 1980s. The young-adult novel focuses on the "citizen spy network" that emerged during the fall of Soviet regimes, following seventeen-year-old...

Harlem Shuffle is a novel by American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. Set in New York in the years 1959, 1961, and 1964, the novel depicts the life of a small-business owner who gets embroiled in criminal activities.

Ray Carney...

Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface (2023) follows the story of June Hayward, a young white woman who has faced years of bitter failure while trying to break into publishing as a fiction writer. June's lack of success is contrasted by the...

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet, playwright, and actress who challenged the social norms of the early twentieth century. Her poem "First Fig," published in her 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles, concerns the intense and...

Survival in Auschwitz is a memoir written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was imprisoned in one of the Nazis' infamous death camps from 1944 through to the fall of the Third Reich in late 1945. Levi states that he did not write the book just to...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a magical-realist novel about a Tokyo cafe that offers customers the opportunity to travel through time.

The book is divided into four parts. The first section focuses on a woman who wants to go...

The Changeling is a Jacobean tragedy co-written by playwrights Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. It was originally performed in May of 1622 and first published in 1652 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley.

Critics have long speculated as to which...

The Painter of Signs (1976) is a novel by celebrated Indian author R. K. Narayan. It describes a tumultuous romance between a sign painter and a political activist.

The novel tells the story of a man named Raman, a perfectionist sign painter. He...

“Nikki-Rosa” is a free-verse poem first published in Nikki Giovanni's 1968 collection Black Judgement. The poem, which is autobiographical in nature, discusses Giovanni's childhood near Cincinnati, Ohio. The poem addresses the public perception of...

When Charles Dickens sat down to write what would eventually become the novel David Copperfield, he first intended to write an autobiography, a recollection of his tumultuous, eventful life. Many of his memories, however, were too painful for him...

Percy Bysse Shelley wrote "Ode to the West Wind" in a wooded area near Florence, Italy in one sitting on October 25, 1819. The poem was first published in 1820 in the collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems....

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, the book tells the story of a group of young women attending Appleyard College, an Australian boarding school in Macedon, Victoria. It details their mysterious...

Published in two parts in 1901 and 1902, Jerusalem is a multigenerational saga that tells the story of families in Dalarna, Sweden, and a Swedish church group who emigrated to a utopian Christian commune in Jerusalem, Israel. Inspired by a real...

“Daybreak in Alabama” is a poem by Langston Hughes about a composer who fantasizes about creating music that will embody the beauty of life in Alabama and thereby lead to healing and a better world. The poem became popular during the sixties due...

Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work centers on love, sex, food, relationships, conflict, and healing. In her poem "Basket of Figs," published in the 2002 collection Mules of Love, the speaker invites her lover to lay...

Stuart Little is a children's book written and published by E.B. White in 1945. It was this first book of White’s as well as his second, Charlotte’s Web, that secured his reputation as one of the most beloved American writers of children’s...