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Of her over 70 novels, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is her most famous, and possibly the most widely read mystery novel ever published. Published in novel form in 1934, it was first released as a serialized story in the Saturday...

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a part-autobiographical poem reflecting on the losses that the poet encountered throughout her lifetime. The nineteen-line poem is written in villanelle form and is divided into six stanzas. The poet considers the...

Published in 1914, Saki's "The Lumber Room" is a comedic short story about Nicholas, a mischievous upper-class English boy who uses his cleverness and imagination to subvert his aunt's authority.

After putting a frog in his breakfast, Nicholas has...

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a 2017 novel by Jesmyn Ward. The story follows a biracial family living in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. There are three narrators that relate the story's events in alternating chapters. The narrators are...

Frogs, or The Frogs, is one of Aristophanes's greatest comedies and is justly celebrated for its wit and keen commentary on Athenian politics and society. It is the last surviving work of Old Comedy and is thus also notable for its heralding a...

Published in 1939, Sinclair Ross's "The Painted Door" is a short story about Ann, a farmer's wife who has an affair while her husband is away during a fierce winter storm. Feeling an increasing sense of isolation, alienation, and resentment, Ann...

Despite appearing later in her career, Nights at the Circus, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1984, stands as one of the most important novels in Angela Carter’s vast oeuvre of fiction, in terms of expanding her readership and bringing...

Published in 2003, Jerry Spinelli's Loser is a children's novel about a boy who struggles to fit in with his peers due to his clumsiness, poor grades, and lack of self-awareness. Nicknamed "Loser" after failing to win a team race, Donald Zinkoff...

Xala is a novel by Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène, originally written in French in 1973. The following year, it was made into an award-winning movie by Sembène himself, and it was translated into English as part of the influential Heinemann...

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Matthew Warchus, Pride (released in 2014) tells the true story of Mark Ashton and a group of lesbian and gay activists who started a group to raise money for British miners who were affected by the British Miners'...

Written in 1952, Chinua Achebe's short story "Marriage is a Private Affair" is about a Nigerian father who rejects his son's decision to marry for love instead of accepting an arranged marriage. While arranged marriages are traditional in the...

Cate Kennedy's second short story collection, Like a House on Fire, was published in 2012 by Scribe. In the collection, Kennedy explores topics of displacement, illness, recovery, dependence, and motherhood, among other things. The stories in this...

Hatchet, published by Bradbury Press in 1987, is Gary Paulsen's best-known novel. It is the first of five in the Hatchet series, detailing the events in Brian Robeson's life after he ends up stranded in a forest after the pilot of a bush plane he...

O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," written in 1907, is a comedic short story about two kidnappers who are traumatized by the ten-year-old they abduct, eventually having to pay the boy's father to take him back. Although the kidnappers are...

Seamus Heaney's poem "Death of a Naturalist" appears in a collection with the same name. Published in 1966, Death of a Naturalist is recognized as Seamus Heaney's first major volume, and it was well-received by critics, boosting Heaney's career...

Anna in the Tropics is a play by Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, originally commissioned in 2001 and performed for the first time in Miami in 2002. Later, it premiered on Broadway in 2003.

When writing the play, Cruz has stated that his...

Ex Machina is a science-fiction thriller from 2014, written and directed by Alex Garland, starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, and Sonoya Mizuno. It tells the story of a young coder at a large tech company who is invited to...

Ayad Akhtar's one-act play Disgraced is about Amir Kapoor, an American-born lawyer whose Muslim background interferes with his promotion to partner at his Jewish-run legal firm. Amir learns he has not made partner during a dinner party in his...

First published as Ice Candy Man in 1988, Cracking India tells the story of the Partition of India. This historical event occurred in 1947 when the British colony of India was split into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. The story is...

Sherman Alexie's first book, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992 by an independent press, and Alexie was 26 years old at the time. His work received critical acclaim and attracted a great deal of attention from mainstream...

Around eighty-three million people speak Marathi, the official language of the South-Western region of India. Silence! The Court is in Session (Shanatata! Court Chalu Aahe!) is a play written in the Marathi language by playwright Vijay Tendulkar;...

Devil on the Cross is a novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, originally written and published in 1980 under the name Caitani Mutharabaini in the Gĩkũyũ language. The following year, it was translated to English by the author himself, and it was published...

“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is one of Leo Tolstoy’s most gripping and affecting short stories. Published in 1886, the story examines the futility of chasing wealth, depicts the perils of greed and pride, and condemns corrupt economic...

Oliver Twist was first published in 1837 in serial format, in Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was editing at the time. Oliver Twist was Dickens’s second novel and his first real social novel, critiquing the harm public institutions inflicted...