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Claude McKay published his poem “The White House” in 1922. It appeared alongside three other poems in a collection titled “Spring Sonnets,” published in The Liberator, an American communist magazine. The poem utilizes the sonnet form which,...

"Beach Burial" is a poem by Kenneth Slessor that details a scene from a World War II battle in Egypt that Slessor witnessed in 1942. Slessor worked as a war correspondent during World War II, which offered him an opportunity to see the world...

It would be fair to say that American author Ann Napolitano is one of the most widely read and important authors of her time. Hello Beautiful, Napolitano's fourth novel inspired by Little Women and first published in 2023, cements her legacy as...

Shame is a novel written by author Salman Rushdie, first published in 1983. Set in the fictional town of Q. in the imaginary country "Peccavistan"—based on Quetta, in Pakistan—the book follows the intersection of various lives during a turbulent...

The Mysterious Benedict Society, which was published in 2007, is the first novel in author Trenton Lee Stewart's quartet of children's novels called "The Mysterious Benedict Society." The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) follows four children...

English author Philip Reeve began his career as an illustrator, something which is reflected in his writing style. Unlike some other writers, Reeve doesn't plan before he writes. Instead, he starts writing with an opening and closing image in...

Few know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work outside of his most famous character: Sherlock Holmes. But Doyle was a prolific writer who crafted some of the best short stories in existence. One such short story is called "How It Happened," which was...

"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to...

Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in six monthly installments in 1996. It tells the story of a death-row supervisor named Paul Edgecombe, who one day encounters a prisoner with extraordinary powers named John Coffey....

Stay True was published in September of 2022. In addition to describing Hsu's maturation as a young Asian American man, the memoir is centered on the death of Hsu's friend Ken, who was killed while they were both students at Berkeley. In tender...

"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the...

The Vendor of Sweets is a novel by critically acclaimed Indian author R.K. Narayan. Set in India during the 1960s, It follows the life of a vendor of sweetmeats named Jagan as he tries to navigate a difficult relationship with his son Mali.

Set in...

Where the Crawdads Sing, published in 2018, tells the story of a 1950s North Carolina town that accuses the mysterious "Marsh Girl," Kya Clark, of a local celebrity's murder. According to author Delia Owens, the text explores " how isolation...

Marlowe lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

Published in 1989, Sexing the Cherry is Jeanette Winterson's third novel. It was preceded by Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and The Passion (1987). Sexing the Cherry incorporates elements of historical fiction, which is an element shared by...

Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, first published in 1996, is a satirical novel about a single woman in her thirties who hopes to lose weight, improve her career, eliminate her vices, gain self-control, and find love. Her ambitions are...

Mona Awad's Bunny was first published in June 2019. Awad's novel follows a young woman named Samantha Heather Mackey, who feels like an outsider in her tiny and incredibly selective Master of Fine Art Arts program at a university in New England....

Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six was first published in 2019 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller, selling millions of copies in countries across the world. Reid's novel received mostly positive reviews.

In their review, ...

November 9, which was initially published in 2015, is a novel about fate, its connection to love, and love at first sight. It tells the story of a young woman named Fallon, who one day—by pure happenstance—meets a young man named Ben, who wants to...

It would be difficult to distill the experiences of a generation of English children who lived through World War II into a single volume, let alone a children's book. The War That Saved My Life, which was published in 2015, does just that. It...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu Nigeria Sto a middle-class family and was raised with a strong emphasis on education and literature. Her experiences growing up in Nigeria and witnessing the socio-political issues faced by her...

Hang Kang's Human Acts was first published serially in an online literary magazine from 2013 to 2014 and published in book form in 2014. It is a dramatization of the so-called Gwangju Uprising, which took place in South Korea in 1980 and aimed to...

Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, the Mule, the Fox and the Horse is a children's illustrated book first published in 2019. The novel examines the relationship between the four people—the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse—mentioned in the title of...

The Other Side of Truth was published in 2000. It was inspired by real-life events from 1995 and is told from the perspective of a young girl named Sade Solaja, who immigrated from Nigeria at a young age after her mother was shot and killed by the...