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Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is the last—and best-selling—book Dr. Seuss published in his prolific career. Since its publication in 1990, the book has sold over twelve million copies, surpassing beloved classics like The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax,...

The Thief and the Dogs is a novel written by Naguib Mahfouz. The novel was published in 1961, and is seen as a political statement about the 1952 Egyptian revolution and the disappointment Mahfouz and many others felt after the revolution.

The...

The Rosie Project was originally written as a screenplay when Graeme Simsion studied screenwriting at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia in 2006-2007. By 2008, he had completed a draft of a screenplay called The Klara Project, a romantic...

“My Papa’s Waltz,” a 1948 poem by the American writer Theodore Roethke, explores themes of familial conflict, abuse, and intergenerational masculinity through descriptions of a father and son dancing. The poem was published in 1942, but also...

How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is the sixth book for adults in the How to Read... series by Thomas C. Foster. Foster previously wrote How to Read Literature Like a Professor (first published in 2003, and revised in 2014), followed by How...

"Poppies in October" is a short poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath, focusing on the contrast between urban and rural life and on the world's capacity to produce unexpected beauty. The poem was published in Plath's 1965 poetry collection ...

"The Next War" is a 1917 poem by the British writer Wilfred Owen, in which a soldier narrates his experiences with a personified version of death in order to ultimately condemn the nationalistic forces behind war. Like many of Owen's poems, "The...

One of Percy Shelley's most beloved poems, "The Cloud," published in 1820, exemplifies the poet's revolutionary spirit as it transforms the work's namesake into a universal symbol of change. As the cloud undergoes a variety of transformations—a...

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers is a poem written by American poet Adrienne Rich. It was first published in her anthology collection, A Change of World (1951).

In the poem, Aunt Jennifer is sewing tapestries of beautiful and vibrant tigers. The speaker...

Donald Barthelme's Snow White, published in 1967, is a postmodernist retelling of the Snow White fairytale. Snow White and the seven dwarves—Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem, and Dan—share an apartment and the novel loosely focuses on the...

"Gretel in Darkness" is a 1975 poem by the American poet Louise Glück, exploring themes of trauma and justice through a retelling of the well-known fairytale "Hansel and Gretel." It was first published in Glück's collection The House on the...

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse is one of Anne Carson’s early fictional works, following Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Plainwater (1995). Published in 1998 to general acclaim, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was...

To a Mouse is a poem written by Scottish poet Robert Burns, published in 1785.

The poem describes the speaker’s regret at accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest. The speaker is forced to think about many others in a similar situation, in which...

"Amends" is a poem by the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Written in 1995, it was published fairly late in her career, in the collection Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995. The book responds to an American democracy Rich perceived...

Published in 1958, Langston Hughes's short story "Thank You Ma'am" is about an attempted purse snatching that turns into a lesson about dignity, generosity, and trust.

When a teenage boy, Roger, tries to steal a large woman's purse, the woman,...

"Ae Fond Kiss" is a lyric poem written by Robert Burns in which a speaker addresses his lover on the occasion of their permanent parting. It was first published in the fourth volume of the series Scots Musical Museum, published by James Johnson,...

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is an autobiography by poet Audre Lorde. Published in 1982, Lorde’s book was released in an era when feminist writers, critics, and theorists were coming to terms with the many ways cultural and sexual diversity...

“Easter, 1916” is one of Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s most famous poems. The poem was written about an event known as the “Easter Rising.” On Easter Sunday of 1916, a group of Irish Republicans who wanted an independent Irish republic...

Snow is a novel by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, originally written in Turkish in 2002. Two years later in 2004, it was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published for an Anglophone audience.

The novel—which follows a Turkish poet named...

Ti-Jean and His Brothers is a 1958 play by the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott. It tells the story of three brothers, Gros Jean, Mi Jean, and Ti-Jean, all of whom attempt to outwit the Devil. Its repetitive structure, in which each brother attempts...

The Ballad of the Landlord is a poem written by African American poet Langston Hughes, and was first published in 1940. Hughes was one of the more prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and he uses his poems to reflect on his own struggles...

“What Were They Like?” was published in British-American poet Denise Levertov’s 1967 collection The Sorrow Dance. It is an anti-war poem. Levertov had been active in the movement against the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The war gave rise to massive...

Home is American novelist Toni Morrison's 10th novel, published by Alfred Knopf in 2012. Morrison has been forthcoming about the various influences on the germination and the writing of the novel. She wanted to critique the faddish affection for...

The Cat in the Hat, published in 1957, seems like a simple, straightforward text. After all, Theodore Geisel, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, wrote beloved picture books for young children, and he used a total of 236 different words—most of which...