“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is a characteristically witty poem by the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in 1859, and wrote most of his poetry in the late nineteenth century. Although today he is best known for his poetry,...

Carpentaria is a 2006 novel by Alexis Wright about the tortured relations between white settlers and the Aboriginal Black community in the remote mudflats of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Queensland, Australia. The novel centers around...

Ada Limón's poem "Wife" appears in her 2018 book, The Carrying. The speaker reflects on her lingering discomforts with the word, "wife," and how it implies a restrictive domestic role and rigid archetype. She expressed her distaste for and...

First published in 1988, The Devil's Arithmetic is a historical fiction novel by Jane Yolen. The story revolves around Hannah Stern, a Jewish girl living in New Rochelle, New York. Tired of hearing her older relatives talk about the past,...

T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is a fantasy novel about Wart, a fatherless young boy who is mentored by the wizard Merlyn and has various adventures that prepare him to become king. First published in 1938, it is the first book in White's The...

Jason Reynolds' Long Way Down is a 2017 young-adult novel about a fifteen-year-old who sets out to avenge his brother's fatal shooting and encounters several ghosts who make him question his resolve.

Written in verse and narrated by Will Holloman,...

Ada Limón's poem "Dead Stars" was published in her 2018 book The Carrying. In it, the speaker observes stars in the night sky, thinks about the idea that humans are comprised of stardust, and imagines how people might rise to their full potential...

Seize the Day is a novella by acclaimed American novelist Saul Bellow, published in 1958. It captured the attention and respect of critics and scholars and has since been recognized as one of the essential texts in the canon of one of the...

Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complicated plays, tells the story of a mythic king of England, Cymbeline, who reigned during the first century A.D. Its several plots trace the tribulations of the King and his royal family on...

Patricia McCormick's Sold tells the story of Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, who is sold into the Indian sex slave trade. The novel, published in 2006, was inspired by Patricia McCormick's interviews with Indian and Nepalese sex...

Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World was originally published in 1968. It tells the story of Hafid, a poor camel boy that finds success and begins to live a life of abundance. Through charting Hafid's beginnings, his initial success,...

The Greatest Gift was written in 1943 and published in 1944 by author Philip Van Doren Stern. It tells the story of George Pratt, a depressed man who considers suicide. George makes a plan to commit the act and makes his way to a bridge. However,...

British author Raymond Briggs has written two Christmas classics: The Snowman and Father Christmas. The latter of those novels, Father Christmas, was originally published in 1973 by a small publishing house called Hamish Hamilton. It is, according...

“A Christmas Memory” was initially published in Mademoiselle, a woman's magazine, in 1956. Capote's short story was then reprinted in Capote's 1963 collection The Selected Writings of Truman Capote. Since then, it has been reprinted and...

For author John Grisham, the Christmas season is a foreign concept. Grisham is best known for his thrillers that are set in the legal system. Skipping Christmas, which was published in 2001, is a departure from Grisham's usual fare. Grisham's...

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, which was written by John Updike and illustrated by Edward Gorey, was first published in 1992 in the New Yorker magazine. The novella was subsequently published in book form in 1994 by Pomegranate Communications.

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Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express was first published in 1985. It tells the story of a young boy—who was inspired by the author's own childhood—who is one day welcomed aboard a magical train bound for the North Pole. The boy is promised that...

The Snowman is a picture book by English illustrator Raymond Briggs. It was published in 1978 by Random House. The book follows a boy building a snowman that comes alive at midnight. They play all night long, careful not to wake up the parents....