Bad Dreams (2017) by Tessa Hadley is a collection of six separate but thematically connected short stories. Broadly, they tell the stories of people who have to deal with difficult situations. One story follows two sisters who begin to fight...

Jean Lee Latham's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (first published in 1955) is a children's biography about Nathaniel Bowditch, an American sailor, and mathematician responsible for one of the most essential books for seamen of the 18th and 19th centuries:...

The Echo Maker is a novel by American author Richard Powers. The story revolves around a man named Mark Schluter, who develops a neurological condition after being in a bad car accident.

Set in Nebraska, the novel begins after Mark's accident....

"Afternoon with Irish Cows" first appeared in Billy Collins' fourth poetry collection Picnic, Lightning (1998). Notably, the original cover of the collection depicts an open, gold-colored field with animals grazing, which visually captures the...

The Magic Finger is a children's novel written by British author Roald Dahl. It follows the adventures of a young girl who possesses magical abilities.

An unnamed young girl, the story's narrator, is born on a small farm in the English...

The Prophets (2021) is a work of historical fiction set in the antebellum American Deep South on the Halifax plantation—called Empty by the enslaved men and women who work there day and night. In his debut novel, Robert Jones, Jr. imagines a love...

Langston Hughes’s “Aunt Sue’s Stories” is a free-verse poem about a young black boy who finds comfort in the stories that his Aunt Sue tells him. Aunt Sue’s enchanting voice and somber tone give the child a vivid sense of the life experiences that...

"In the Waiting Room" is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, written in 1976. This makes it one of Bishop's later works, written not long before her death in 1979. The poem is written from the point of view of a girl of six, accompanying...

In 1987, a large storm hit England’s southern coast, where the poet Grace Nichols was living. This inspired her to write the poem “Hurricane Hits England,” in which a powerful storm sparks an epiphany for an unnamed speaker. Nichols characterizes...

Published in 1986 in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's native language, Gĩkũyũ, Matigari ma Njiruungi follows the story of a mythologized revolutionary who survives a revolution in an unnamed country. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote Matigari largely in exile in a...

Kamala Markandaya's Nectar In A Sieve is a 1954 novel about a family of Hindu farmers living in a remote Indian village over several decades in the first half of the twentieth century. During a period of urbanization, the family navigates...

Siegfried Sassoon was a British writer and poet whose work challenged common patriotic conceptions about World War One. "The Rear-Guard," published in Sassoon's 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems, follows a soldier making his way along...

Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by American author Barbara Kingsolver. It tells the story of a young boy who grows up in rural Appalachia, navigating numerous difficulties. Kingsolver has said it is a modern, Southern retelling of Charles Dickens...

Siegfried Sassoon was a British poet and novelist, best known for his antiwar poetry published after serving as a soldier in the First World War. "Attack," first published in 1918 in the collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems, gives a harrowing...

Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross was published in 1942, during the height of World War II. The novel is set in the Westhofen camp, which is fictitious but based in part on real-life concentration camps. It follows a young man named George Heisler,...

Robert Seethaler's The Tobacconist (2017) is a novel about war and friendship. The novel is set during the Nazi occupation of Vienna, Austria, during WWII. It follows a seventeen-year-old young man named Franz Huchel, who travels to Vienna to...

Siegfried Sassoon was a British writer and poet who is remembered today for his angry, satirical, and compassionate poems concerning the horrors of World War I. "The Death Bed," published in the 1917 collection The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, ...

Siegfried Sassoon was a British poet and novelist who is best known today for his angry, satirical, and compassionate poems concerning the horrors of World War One. "Base Details," written in the poet's diary in 1917 and published in the...