For Linda Villarosa, who is a regular contributor to the 1619 Project, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation (published in 2022) is personal. As an author and activist, Villarosa is deeply...

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published strangers to Ourselves in September 2022. Aviv's nonfiction book explores the relationship between culture, society, and how mental illness and how society treats the mentally ill. She does this by telling the...

Gitanjali (or "Song Offerings" in English) is Bengali author and poet Rabindranath Tagore's poetry collection, first published in Bengali in 1910 and in English in 1912. There are 156 or 157 poems in Gitanjali (scholars have not yet decided how...

Mia P. Manansala's debut novel Arsenic and Adobo was published in May 2021 and quickly gained critical acclaim. The story follows Lila Macapagal, a young woman who returns home to help save her aunt's failing Filipino restaurant after a painful...

Ed Yong has devoted his career to learning more and writing about the natural world—including humans and the animals that live inside of it. Yong's second book, called An Immense World (which was published in 2022), is about animal senses....

Carol Ann Duffy is one of Scotland's most acclaimed and widely read poets. She was also named poet laureate of the United Kingdom in 2009. Throughout her long and illustrious career, Duffy wrote countless poems and poetry collections. None,...

Trust is a novel that was written by Hernan Diaz in 2022 and published by Riverhead Books. This book is about money, wealth, status, the role of women in this process, love and madness. That’s why The Washington Post and The New York Times called...

Namwali Serpell's The Furrows, which was published in September 2022, tells the story of Cassandra Williams and her brother, Wayne. One day, the two have an accident while together and Wayne disappears and presumably dies. His body, however, is...

In many ways, Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which was initially published in March of 2022, is a difficult novel to describe and fully explain. It is a novel about self-discovery and a novel about dreams. It also tells the story of a young...

The Grand Illusion (released as La Grande Illusion) is director Jean Renoir's French-language war film which was initially released in 1937. Renoir's film follows a group of French soldiers, led by Captain de Boeldieu and Lieutenant Maréchal, who...

English author Maria Louise Ramé, who operated and published the work under the pseudonym Ouida, published A Dog of Flanders in 1872. The novel is set in Antwerp, Belgium and follows a boy and his dog's adventures in the town. Nello, on one hand,...

British author Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices was published by Collins in 1980. It is set during the height of the Blitz in 1940, when the Nazi Luftwaffe (or German Air Force), battered the United Kingdom nightly with different kinds of bombs....

Firekeeper's Daughter was published in March 2021 by Henry Holt and Co. It was written by Native American author and activist Angeline Boulley, who has spent most of her life devoted to improving the lives and education of Native American people....

"B. Wordsworth" is Trinidadian-British author V.S. Naipaul's short story first published in 1959 in his acclaimed collection entitled Miguel Street. The short story is told from Naipaul's point of view, and explores his relationship (in the story,...

It would be fair to say that Ralph Ellison is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man (not to be confused with H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man). Some historians have called "The Black Ball," one of author Ralph Ellison's most...

"At Hiruharama" is acclaimed English author Penelope Fitzgerald's short story first published as a part of her short story collection entitled The Means of Escape, which was first published in 2000, when Fitzgerald was 84. Fitzgerald's short story...

The Drought was initially published in 1964 as The Burning World. It was retitled as The Drought and published by Berkley Books in 1965. In the early 1960s, at the start of his career, author J.G. Ballard wrote a series of science fiction novels....

Memory of Water is Finnish novelist Emmi Itäranta's debut novel, published in 2014 by HarperCollins. Itäranta's novel is set in a dystopian future in which water has become scarce because of climate change caused by humanity. As a result of the...

Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist was initially published by Simon and Schuster in September 2009. A horror novel written for young adults, Yancey's novel is presented as entries in the diary of a young man and orphan named Will Henry, the...

Gail Giles' Shattering Glass was initially published by Roaring Book Press in 2001. The novel is set over the course of one school year and is told from the perspective of a high school senior named Young Stewart, who is a member of the "in crowd"...

Italian director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (or "The Sweet Life") was released in 1960. Set across seven days and nights and in Rome, Italy, La Dolce Vita follows a young man named Marcello Rubini. Disillusioned with his life, Marcello walks...