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Published in 1845, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" is a fairy tale about an impoverished girl who, afraid to return to her violent family after not having sold any matches, strikes matches which induce hallucinations of her...

Where the Wild Things Are is a children's book published in 1963 and written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. When it was initially released, it was met with mixed reviews for its honest portrayal of child anger. Some critics argued it would...

After a decade of reading, research, and writing, Donna Tartt published her highly-anticipated third novel, The Goldfinch. The 2013 novel tells the story of Theo Decker, and centers around loss, death and the titular painting, The Goldfinch.

The...

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of the feminist writer Audre Lorde’s prose works. While Lorde primarily published poetry, she was also an accomplished essayist. Some of her most famous essays—as well as her speeches and...

William Dean Howells is one of the most esteemed American authors of the late nineteenth century, and his literary output is immense, totaling over 100 books across different genres. He is most famous, however, for his Realist novels, a...

Set in Taliban-controlled Kabul, Afghanistan, Deborah Ellis's The Breadwinner follows the story of an eleven-year-old girl who, following her father's sudden arrest, disguises herself as a boy so she may leave the house and make money to support...

The Hungry Tide was published in 2005 and written by Amitav Ghosh (born 1956), an Indian writer known for his English-language novels. Ghosh has written nine novels, and has received multiple awards.

The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans, a...

1917 tells the story of two British soldiers during World War I who are tasked by their general to deliver a message to prevent an isolated unit from attacking the German line. It was directed by Sam Mendes and stars George MacKay, Dean-Charles...

By the Bog of Cats is a 1998 play written by Irish playwright Marina Carr. Inspired by the myth of Medea, the play centers around Hester Swane, a heavy-drinking, low-class woman whose lover has left her for another woman. Now, she must face the...

In many ways, Toru Dutt's poetry sheds light on her status as a transitional or hybrid figure, situated not just at the crossroads of different cultures and traditions but also at a turning point in literary history. Within a single landscape or...

H. R. Ole Kulet does not shy away from the controversial in his novel Blossoms of the Savannah. Like his other works, Blossoms of the Savannah focuses on the cultural differences between the traditional, and often ethically complicated, lives of...

Albert Camus is one of the 20th century’s most esteemed writers, and La Peste, or The Plague (1947), is considered one of his masterpieces. Set in the North African French colony of Oran, the novel chronicles a recrudescence of the bubonic plague...

Anne of Green Gables was written by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) and first published in 1908. It tells the story of an orphan girl sent by mistake to a middle-aged brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, and introduces some of the...

“A Wagner Matinee” was first published in the February 1904 edition of Everybody’s Magazine, a nonfiction and fiction magazine founded in 1899 by Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. Cather had a lifelong passion for Wagner's music, and many of...

Published in 1846, The German Ideology is Marx and Engels’s first public attempt to outline the basics of Marxist theory as we now understand it. Here we find both the familiar political polemics around class warfare and proletarian revolution,...

Charles Dickens' ghost story "The Signalman" is about an unnamed narrator who takes an interest in a railway signal operator who is haunted by a specter. The specter's ambiguous warnings lead to the signalman being run over by a train.

First...

A Tempest, written in 1968, is Aimé Césaire's postcolonial adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. It follows the actions of the Shakespeare play, but makes the relation between Prospero and his fairy slaves, Ariel and Caliban, that of a...

A Little Princess is a children’s novel written by the English-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett. Published in 1905 as an adaptation of Burnett's serialized novel Sara Crewe, it is considered a classic of English-language children's...

Wonder, a story about a ten-year-old boy who lives in Manhattan and who has a rare physical deformity, was published in February of 2012 and was author R.J. Palacio's first novel.

Palacio was inspired to write Wonder after taking her son to buy...

The Ghost Bride is a critically-acclaimed novel by breakout Malaysian novelist Yangsze Choo first published by William Morrow in 2013. Set in 19th-century Malaya under British colonial rule, The Ghost Bride explores themes of tradition, love, and...

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...

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...

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...