Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England" was published in 1976, in the poet's last collection, Geography III. It retells the well-known narrative of Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe's early English novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe's...

Luckiest Girl Alive is the debut novel by American novelist Jessica Knoll. It was published in 2015, at which time Knoll was working as an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. The novel sold well, and made the New York Times Bestsellers List. The...

Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Richard Cory," originally published in Robinson's 1897 collection The Children of the Night,...

Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Miniver Cheevy," a narrative poem published in Robinson's 1910 collection The Town Down The...

People of the Whale is a novel by American author Linda Hogan. Published in 2008, it depicts the trials of a Native American man named Thomas, and various members of his family, as they struggle with the loss of their culture in the face of...

Written and directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club (1985) is a comedy-drama film about five teenagers who forge unexpected bonds over the course of an all-day detention.

Taking place over eight hours inside a fictional Illinois high school,...

Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. The work was written in Latin and it was published in Louvain (present-day Belgium). Utopia is a work of satire, indirectly criticizing Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. More was a...

Helen Dunmore was a British author whose work addresses themes of motherhood, war, friendship, childhood, and nature. Originally published in her 2007 collection Glad of These Times, the poem “To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is a dramatic monologue in...

"won't you celebrate with me" is a poem by the American writer Lucille Clifton. One of Clifton's better-known works, "won't you celebrate with me" was published in Clifton's 1993 poetry collection Book of Light. Like much of her work, it explores...

Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race is a 2016 memoir about growing up Black in a mostly white suburb of Sydney, Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Covering her early childhood to the end of high school, Clarke details the near-constant racist...

Volpone was published first in 1607 as a quarto and then in 1616 as part of Jonson's collected Workes. In the later edition, the date of the first performance of Volpone is listed as 1605. However, many scholars speculate that the first...

Maleficent (2014) is a dark, live-action retelling of Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of Maleficent, the original film's antagonist. The film explores Maleficent's backstory, emphasizing her sympathetic...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work examines the inextricable link between humans and nature. Originally published in Sheers's 2006 poetry collection Skirrid Hill, "Mametz Wood" is a poem that reckons with events from the past; specifically,...

Alan Gratz's Refugee is a young-adult novel about three young refugees from different eras: Josef Landau, a German Jew displaced from Nazi Germany; Isabel Fernandez, a Cuban fleeing her starving country in 1994; and Mahmoud Bishara, a Syrian...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work uses nature to symbolize human affairs, emotions, and relationships. First published in Sheers's 2006 collection Skirrid Hill, “Winter Swans” is a poem about a couple experiencing issues in their...

Marc Olden's Black Samurai (1974) is a crime thriller novel about Robert Sand, an American GI who is trained by a Japanese samurai master to become the world's strongest fighter. Working alongside a former US president, Sand uses his martial arts...

Life of Pi began with some casual reading. Yann Martel was perusing through John Updike’s rather negative review of Max and the Cats, a story about a Jewish family who run a zoo in Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. They decide...

Brigid Delaney is a leading Australian travel journalist working for the Guardian as a senior columnist and speechwriter for federal Ministers. Besides working for the Guardian, Delaney has authored two famous books in her native Australian native...

Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997) is a novel about William Henry Devereaux, Jr.'s (also called "Hank") mid-life crisis. Russo's novel is set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania and follows the aforementioned Hank, the misanthropic chairman of...

Born in 1969, Victor Gischler is an American author of crime fiction. Victor Gischler is a Ph.D. graduate in English from Southern Mississippi University, and most of his fiction work is translated into Japanese, Italian, French, and Spanish...

Ben Macintyre is a British author born in 1963 in Oxford, United Kingdom. Throughout Macintyre’s career, he has worked as a The Times newspaper columnist and author. Macintyre's columns vary from contemporary affairs to chronological debates....