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Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America was published in 2023. It was a New York Times bestseller and was reviewed favorably.

The origins of the book lie in Richardson’s desire to answer questions that people...

An irreverent science-fiction adventure novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy constitutes the first installment of a five-book “trilogy” by Douglas Adams. The story is derived largely from a radio show, the scripts of which Adams compiled to...

Several critics have compared Ki-young Kim's 1960 film The Housemaid to Bong Joon Ho's Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite. Like Parasite, The Housemaid tells a story about an upper middle class family wrestling with issues of class and...

There have only been a handful of directors whose first films have captured the cultural zeitgeist like Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015). The film, which stars Anya Taylor-Joy in her breakthrough role as Thomasin, is set in the early 1600s in New...

Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, The Story of Their Lives, A Girls’ Book was written by Louisa May Alcott and published in two parts. Roberts Brothers published the first part on September 30, 1868. After its success, with the first 2000...

Sido est une nouvelle d'inspiration auto-biographique écrite par Colette en 1929-1930 alors qu'elle est âgée de 56 ans. Dans cette oeuvre en trois parties, Colette évoque ses souvenirs d'enfance, inspirée par la personnalité de sa mère et de son...

We Do Not Part is a novel in three parts written by South Korean author Han Kang and translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, first published in 2021 in Korean and 2025 in English. Kang considers this book to form a pair with...

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James's Theatre in London on February 14, 1895, only a month after Wilde's previous success, An Ideal Husband. The packed-in audience rollicked with laughter at the on-stage...

On Tyranny is historian Timothy Snyder’s most famous work. Published in 2017 and updated after the attack on the Capitol in 2020, it uses examples from European history to warn and instruct Americans about the imminent arrival of tyranny in their...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in serial form in the Egoist in the years 1914-15. Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-changing decision to leave Ireland, the...

"Barn Burning" was originally published in the June, 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is a prequel to the "Snopes" trilogy, made up of the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). In 1980, "Barn Burning" was made into...

Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles and Sweetgrass is a novel that largely follows Virgil Second, a thirteen-year-old boy who realizes that the mysterious stranger his mother is dating is Nanabush, a legendary Trickster god with suspicious...

The Vegetarian is a novel in three parts written by South Korean author Han Kang and translated into English by Deborah Smith, first published in 2007 in Korean and 2015 in English. The concept for the book came from a short story Han wrote ten...

Chilean author Isabel Allende is best known for her works of magical realism, much like Gabriel García Márquez, who helped the genre enter the cultural consciousness. Allende's In the Midst of Winter was published in 2017 and follows a Brooklyn,...

The Midnight Library is a novel by British author Matt Haig, published in 2020. The book explores the idea of unlived lives through the story of a woman named Nora Seed, who struggles to find meaning in her daily life.

The book follows Nora as she...

Klara and the Sun (2021) is Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and his first published one since he won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Ishiguro first considered writing this story as a children’s book, but his daughter told him it would traumatize young...

Han Kang's Human Acts was first published serially in the online literary magazine Window from 2013 to 2014. The novel was later published in full in 2014 by Changbi Publishers, with Deborah Smith finishing an English translation in 2016. The...

Lonesome Dove is a Western novel by Larry McMurtry published in 1985. Set in the 1870s, the book follows two retired Texas Rangers named Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae as they organize a cattle drive and set out from Lonesome Dove, Texas to...

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, the origins of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to ascertain. The play as we have it today comes from the First Folio of 1623. However, an earlier version of the play, entitled The Taming of a Shrew, was...

As You Like It was likely written between 1598 and 1600. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600 but no edition followed the entry, thereby leading to the ambiguity in its publication date. Two topical references have been...

Published in 2023 by Grove Atlantic, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is a sprawling family saga that explores themes of faith, loss, and healing. Set against the backdrop of British-occupied Kerala (a state in southwestern India) and...

In the long history of cinema, few three-hour films have achieved both immense critical acclaim and commercial success like Sir Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Released in July 2023, the film overcame years of setbacks in "development hell"...

Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is about Jim, a slave who runs away with the ambition to get enough money to purchase his wife and daughter from the white slave...

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is an historical fiction novella set in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland, and first published in 2020. The novella follows a coal and timber merchant named Bill Furlong in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985....