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The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's autobiography, written during her time at Radcliffe College and published when she was 22 years old. It details her life from birth to age 21, beginning with an account of her family's home in Alabama and the...

Published in 1989, I for Isobel follows a thoughtful young woman named Isobel Callaghan as she deals with family conflict, personal independence, and the awakening of her literary ambitions. This short, incisive novel is the defining work of...

Jean Toomer’s Cane is one of the most influential works in the history of African-American literature. A “literary work” is truly the most appropriate term for Cane, certainly more appropriate than “novel.” Cane is comprised of sketches written in...

July's People, published in 1981 by Nadine Gordimer, is set during a counterfactual revolutionary civil war in South Africa, in which black South Africans rise up and overthrow their white oppressors, with the aid of neighboring African nations....

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer's third novel, adapted from an article he published in Outside magazine following the tragic events of May 1996 on the slopes of Mt. Everest. At the time of its publication in 1997, Into Thin Air garnered widespread...

Three Day Road is author Joseph Boyden's debut novel, published in 2005 to critical and commercial approval. The novel was inspired in part by the war stories Boyden heard growing up, from both his father (a World War II veteran) and his...

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is Modernist poet Wallace Stevens at his most whimsical, and his most notoriously evasive. Originally published in 1922, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” was included in Stevens’ 1923 debut collection, Harmonium. This poem...

Outcasts United is a book published in 2009 by author and journalist Warren St. John.

The book tackles contemporary issues faced by refugees, especially those from Africa and the Middle East, who have been placed in the United States. The book...

Station Eleven is a critically acclaimed 2015 novel by up-and-coming author Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven was a National Book Award Finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist. The novel was listed as one of the best books of the year by...

J. M. Coetzee retells a familiar story in Foe yet challenges that very familiarity. Even people who have never read the novel Robinson Crusoe are relatively well acquainted with its iconic portrait of survival after a shipwreck, as well as with...

Njal's Saga is the longest and the most revered of the forty family sagas written in Iceland between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The events of the saga come from several different sources, including oral tales, The Book of Settlements...

The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost Stories is a compendium of horror stories by the celebrated writer Ambrose Bierce, renowned for his eerie tales of the American countryside and his biting wit. HP Lovecraft wrote of Ambrose Bierce, "Virtually all...

"The Snow Man" is one of modernist master Wallace Stevens' most acclaimed poems, and it is also one of his earliest. Originally published in the October 1921 issue of Poetry magazine, it then appeared in Stevens' first full-length collection, ...

A narrative of loss, struggle, and redemption in the wake of World War II, Ceremony (1977) ranks among the defining works of Native-American poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. Although Ceremony is normally classified as a novel, the text is in...

Arthur Conan Doyle published The Valley of Fear in serial form in Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. A book form followed the British serialization in 1915. The manuscript, 176 folio pages with Doyle’s deletions and revisions,...

Ever wonder what happens when an author passes away before his or her next book is completed? Z for Zachariah is one answer to that question. Author Robert C. O’Brien is probably most famous for his Newberry Award-winning classic Mrs. Frisby and...

Matilda is a novel written by the famed children’s author Roald Dahl. It was first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape in London. The book was illustrated by Dahl’s frequent collaborator Quentin Blake. It has been made into an audiobook, a feature...

Dracula. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Jane Eyre, The Fall of the House of Usher, Rebecca, and The Haunting of Hill House. That Hound of the Baskervilles scaring people out on the moors. Tim Burton’s career. Joy Division and New Order. All of these...

My Children! My Africa! is a two-act play written by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright who has written over 30 plays. There are only three characters in the play: a white South African teenage girl, a black South African teenage boy,...

News from Nowhere is a utopian novel written by British author William Morris. Morris was a founding member of the Socialist League, an organization founded in 1885 on the tenets of socialism, a political and economic ideology that advocates for...

Waiting for the Barbarians is a political allegory about the paranoia at the roots of imperial narratives and the blood lust of colonial violence. Written during the apartheid era in South Africa, the novel is a heart of darkness fable, reflecting...

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book written by James W. Loewen. It was first published in 1995 and then republished in 2008. It tells the story of how history is taught in the United States, revealing how the many inaccuracies, omissions, and biases...

“The Interlopers” first appeared in the magazine The Bystander in 1912 and again in The Toys of Peace and Other Papers (1919), a collection of short stories published posthumously and compiled by Saki’s friend, Rothay Reynolds. The story features...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by playwright Jack Thorne, directed by John Tiffany, and based on an original story by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The story begins nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts in the...