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After celebrating the joy and charity of Christmas, A Christmas Carol is foremost a condemnation of 19th-century Victorian England's division between the rich and poor, the Haves and Have-Nots. London was a great world power, rich from industry...

Nemesis, published in 2010, chronicles the impact of the 1944 polio epidemic on a middle-class Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, is ineligible to serve in the war and instead works as the...

Age of Iron was published in 1990 and is the sixth novel written by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It was an international critical success, and although it didn't receive any of the prestigious literary awards that some of his other novels...

Although best-known for his novels, acclaimed Indian writer Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava (better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand) wrote quite a few short stories, and among these is "The Shroud," published in 1935. Telling the story of a poor...

By the time Pearl S. Buck published “The Enemy” in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half...

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Originally published in 2017, The Marrow Thieves is a young-adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. Critics have described the novel as dystopian, speculative fiction, science...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

"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,...

Stephen Frears's film The Queen, released in 2006, broadly tells the story of Princess Diana's tragic death and the response (or lack thereof) of the royal family in the days following her death. Particularly, the film centers on Queen Elizabeth...

Produced for the first time at Griffin Theatre Company in 1986, Away is the best known of Michael Gow's plays, both within Australia and around the world. Gow had just turned 30 before the play was written, and in writing it, Gow has said that he...

Likely begun immediately after the completion of the Inferno, Dante Alighieri's epic poem the Purgatorio is the second of the three canticles (sets of cantos) which make up the Divine Comedy or the Commedia. It follows Dante and Virgil as they...

Gary Soto's poem "Oranges" first appeared in his fifth collection of poetry, Black Hair, in 1985. The poem appeared a few years later in a collection of poetry geared towards young writers, A Fire in My Hands, in 1991. This collection of poetry...

Artemis Fowl is a young-adult fantasy novel about a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind from Dublin. Unlike most main characters in young-adult novels, Artemis is an antihero instead of the hero of the series. He is a deviant mastermind whose...