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"The Ballot or the Bullet" is a groundbreaking speech given by civil rights pioneer Malcolm X on April 3 and 12, 1964. The speech was delivered twice—first at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and second at the King Solomon Baptist...

Published in 1983, Life and Times of Michael K is a realistic fiction novel by South African author J.M. Coetzee. The book follows the story of Michael K, a poor man living in South Africa and navigating a (fictitious) civil war during the period...

First published in 1939, and considered an early indication of Eudora Welty’s promise as a leading figure in Southern realism, “Petrified Man” has gone on to be one of the most anthologized and analyzed short stories of her extensive oeuvre.

The...

Published in June 2019, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is Ocean Vuong's debut novel. Written in the style of an epistolary novel—a letter from a young Vietnamese-American man (Little Dog) to his older, illiterate mother (Rose)—the novel explores...

Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese comprises three apparently separate storylines: the first follows a monkey deity's desire to be all-powerful; the second follows Jin Wang, a child of Chinese immigrants, as he wrestles with his...

Sam Shepard wrote Buried Child, perhaps his best-known play and the play that won him the Pulitzer in 1979, while he was the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. It is the play most widely credited with turning Shepard...

Prep is Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel. The book's plot revolves around the high-school career of Lee Fiora, a student at the fictional Ault School in Massachusetts. Unlike most prep school students, Lee comes from a middle-class background and...

Baldwin's 1965 collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, is comprised mostly of stories he previously published between 1948 and 1960. The stories touch on themes of sexuality, class, and race, in particular the experience of black...

Joker is a film directed, produced, and written by Todd Phillips (his cowriter was Scott Silver). It is based around the DC Comics villain The Joker and stars Joaquin Phoenix as the title character. Phillips cites Martin Scorsese's films Taxi...

O. Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf" is about a young artist named Johnsy who falls victim to a pneumonia epidemic that hits New York City. As Johnsy counts the ivy leaves falling off the vine outside her window, she superstitiously...

Richard Wagamese published Medicine Walk in 2014. Wagamese was an acclaimed First Nations Ojibway author most notably known for his novel Indian Horse, which was adapted into a film in 2017.

Medicine Walk is told from the perspective of Franklin...

Michèle Marineau's 1992 novel The Road to Chlifa follows Karim Nakad, a seventeen-year-old refugee from the Lebanese civil war, as he faces discrimination in his new life in Montreal, Canada while grappling with the haunting memories of his...

Called a "publishing phenomenon" by the L.A. Times, The Art of Racing in the Rain is the award-winning third novel by American author, filmmaker, and amateur car-racer Garth Stein. Published by HarperCollins in 2008, the novel remained on the New...

"Beverly Hills, Chicago" first appeared in 1949, in Brooks' second collection of poetry, Annie Allen. The poem describes the speaker's experience driving through the affluent white neighborhood of Beverly, Chicago, as someone who is neither...

"We Real Cool" first appeared in Gwendolyn Brooks' third published collection of poetry entitled, The Bean Eaters, in which she continues to explore her primary theme, the experiences of Black people in America. Though she had always been writing...

"The Bean Eaters" is the title poem of Gwendolyn Brooks' third collection of poetry, published by Harpers in 1960. The poem describes an aging Black couple's ritual of sitting down and eating beans on their old, chipped plates while they silently...

D. H. Lawrence composed “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” in the winter of 1916 and completed it in January of the next year under the title “The Miracle.” The manuscript was tinkered with and revised and, of course, retitled before finally being...

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third novel in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In this book, the saga continues as Harry is faced with dementors, the soul-sucking guards of Azkaban prison that bring icy depression into the...

The 57 Bus began as an article for the New York Times Magazine, published in 2015. But the whole time Slater crafted the article and researched the case, she fantasized "writing the story in a different way, for a different audience." Slater knew...

Published in September of 1989, Bharati Mukherjee's third novel, Jasmine, tells the story of its eponymous protagonist's journey from the small village of Hasnapur, India to Jalandhar, to Florida, to New York, and eventually to Iowa, inhabiting a...

Annihilation is a darkly complex novel from author Jeff VanderMeer, the first installment of his Southern Reach Trilogy. It seems to defy categorization: it is at once speculative fiction, science fiction, thriller, and horror, while also being...

"The Lady with the Dog" was written in 1899 by Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, and was first published in the journal Russian Idea. It has often been deemed by critics to be Chekhov's answer to Anna Karenina; Lyudmila Parts calls it...

Phillip Pullman published The Golden Compass, known as Northern Lights outside of North America, in 1995. The novel is the first book in what would become a trilogy entitled His Dark Materials, which also includes The Subtle Knife and The Amber...

Philadelphia, Here I Come! is Brian Friel's breakthrough success. He wrote it in 1964 after having written a few other plays, including The Enemy Within and The Blind Mice. Philadelphia's heart-wrenching and intimate portrayal of an Irishman's...