The Screaming Staircase, which was published by Disney in 2013, is the first novel in Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood and Co. series. The Screaming Staircase is set in present-day London during "the Problems," or an event that led to the emergence of...

Gwen Harwood's poem “Suburban Sonnet” was first published in 1961 in The Bulletin, a prominent Australian literary magazine. It appeared alongside two related poems, “Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day” and “In the Park,” all three of which expose the...

Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) is a play written by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. He composed the play in a two-week period in late July and early August of 1888. Strindberg deemed it a “modern psychological drama” and a “tragedy,” and when...

"Elvis's Twin Sister" first appeared in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 poetry collection The World's Wife. The collection explores themes of gender, femininity, and sexism through poems written from the perspective of real and imagined women with...

A Christmas Story (1983) is a bonafide American classic and a Christmas-time staple. Bob Clark's film tells the story of Ralphie, a young kid who tries to convince everyone possible – parents, teacher, and Santa – that the Red Ryder BB gun is the...

"Pilate's Wife" was originally published in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife. This book consists of poems written from the perspective of various overlooked women in history and myth. In the case of this poem, Duffy adopts the...

Inception is a 2010 action-thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Nolan developed the film over a 10-year period, initially pitching the script to Warner Bros. in 2001 as a horror vehicle. The studio passed and...

Five Tuesdays in Winter is author Lily King's collection of short stories first published in late 2021. Although each story in Five Tuesdays in Winter is somewhat thematically connected, they tell different stories. One story, for instance, tells...

Forbidden City is a historical fiction novel written by American author Vanessa Hua. She is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer born in California. Hua is the author of the short story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities and A...

Published on 12th April 2022, Unlikely Animals is a contemporary novel written by American author Annie Hartnett. She is an acclaimed writer whose work Rabbit Cake was recognized by several platforms as one of the best books of the year. While...

Monkey Boy is a novel published in 2022 by a writer named Francisco Goldman featuring a narrator and protagonist named Francisco Goldberg who is also a writer. Though categorized strictly as a novel, it quickly becomes apparent that readers must...

The title of Jonathan Evison's novel Small World, which was published in 2022 by Dutton, is an oxymoron. The novel is set during some of the most significant periods in human history: the California gold rush, the creation of the Transcontinental...

Stacey D'Erasmo's The Complicities was first published in September 2022 by Algonquin Books. Although it is a short novel, its story packs a massive punch. Fundamentally, The Complicities tells the story an older woman who deals with the fallout...

Fellowship Point, which was published in 2022, tells the story of two women who have forged a lifelong friendship. Together, they have spent nearly eighty summers together on the coast of Maine. And though they are similar in many ways, they are...

The Family Chao, published in early 2022, is Lan Samantha Chang's book which explores what it means to be a family and the immigrant experience. It follows the eponymous Chang family, who have run a Chinese restaurant together for nearly...

David Chariandy's Brother is a 2017 coming-of-age novel about Michael, a child of Trinidadian immigrants who struggles to come to terms with the police killing of his older brother.

Set in the Park, a low-income multicultural neighborhood in...

First published in 2022, Maud Casey's City of Incurable Women is a novel comprised of a collection of short stories that collectively tell the story of women who have been institutionalized in Paris, France's Salpêtrière mental hospital. For many...

Francesca Lia Block's novel House of Hearts was initially published in June 2022 by publisher Rare Bird. It tells the story of Izzy Ames and her high school sweetheart, Cyrus Rivera. With their friends, Izzy and Cyrus create an unbreakable bond...

How Strange a Story is a volume published in 2022 by Megan Mayhew Bergman. The book is a collection of short stories that is filled out to full length by a novella. This is the author's third such collection, following the critically acclaimed ...

Clare Beams was nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for her short story collection We Show What We Have Learned. The Illness Lesson is her debut novel which was published on 11th February 2020. The novel examines the dark side of the...

Louis Bayard is known for his works of speculative historical fiction. Courting Mr. Lincoln, his novel which was published in 2019 and about the courtship between Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln, is one of the author's most recent (and most...

Elif Batuman's Either/Or was published in 2022. The novel follows a young woman named Selin, who is in her sophomore year at Harvard University sometime in 1996. Selin is struggling at Harvard as her struggles begin to influence her school career,...