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Uglies is a young-adult science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity dystopia sometime in the future. It is the first in the Uglies trilogy.

Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old on the verge of undergoing a mandatory cosmetic surgery...

"A New England Nun" is a short story published in 1891 by American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The short story was published in one of Freeman's most acclaimed books, A New England Nun and Other Stories. The story is set in a rural New...

River Thieves is a novel by Canadian author and poet Michael Crummey, originally published in 2001. The novel follows the story of the Peyton family, who have newly arrived in the New World, in the early 1800's. They set up shop in Newfoundland,...

Fifty Shades of Grey is the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which recounts the story of Anastasia Steele, a college student who begins a BDSM relationship with the wealthy Christian Grey. Originally, Fifty Shades of Grey and the...

Decades after the original Blade Runner, director Denis Villeneuve brought back the popular franchise with the release of Blade Runner 2049, in 2017. This film is set thirty years after the original and serves as a sequel to the landmark film....

Almost always listed among the greatest poems to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and very often singled out as the ultimate achievement of that cultural efflorescence, Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” was originally published in Survey Magazine on...

Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades" is a short story about Hermann, a calculating officer in the Army Engineers whose extreme greed leads him to obsess over finding out an old countess's magic formula to winning at the gambling game faro....

The Sand Child was written by Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and was published in 1985 in France. The novel discusses the impact of colonialism on Morroco, and also themes of gender, identity, and tradition. This story is continued in Jelloun’s...

Premiering in 1784, The Marriage of Figaro is the second play in a trilogy of plays about the character "Figaro" written by the notable French playwright and polymath Pierre Beaumarchais. A continuation of the story The Barber of Seville, the play...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti first published “The Woodspurge” in its final stage under the section “Songs” in his 1870 collection The House of Life. With the publication of 1881’s Poems: A New Edition, “The Woodspurge” was removed from its previous...

A children's book written by New York Times bestseller Vashti Harrison, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History tells the stories of 40 black women throughout history and how they contributed to history. These stories, obviously, are told in a...

A Vindication of the Rights of Men is a political pamphlet written by Mary Wollstonecraft. It was published in 1790 and was written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. In this text, Wollstonecraft criticizes...

Apeirogon is a novel published in 2020 by Irish-American author Colum McCann and is based on a real-life story. The book focuses on the unexpected friendship of two fathers, Palestinian Bassam Aramin and Israeli Rami Elhanan, who connect over the...

In his bestselling nonfiction narrative The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown vividly retells the 1936 University of Washington crew team’s journey to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The rowers won gold against all expectations,...

Weather was published in 2020 by American writer Jenny Offill and is her third published book. The novel follows librarian Lizzie Benson as she copes with a chaotic and turbulent American life. From no longer loving her husband to having to deal...

Over the course of his long and illustrious career, British director Ken Loach has directed more classics than some directors have ever had a chance to make in their entire careers. Among those classics is Land and Freedom (1995), which tells the...

When asked to describe The Nice Guys (2016), Ryan Gosling said that it is a "Shane Black film." Gosling stars as Holland March, a struggling, dim-witted private detective with a penchant for screwing up cases and Russell Crowe, a tough enforcer....

Just as Bonnie and Clyde are synonymous with any young male - female criminal duo, so have Thelma and Louise become the poster girls for female best friend ride-or-dies. The movie Thelma and Louise was released in 1991 and quickly became a...

"Jenny" is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is, for the most part, a dramatic monologue about a prostitute. For most of the poem, the speaker, a wealthy, unmarried man, spends the night watching Jenny sleep. The subject matter in "Jenny" is...

Red Dust Road is an autobiographical novel by Scottish author Jackie Kay which tells the story of her twenty-year search for her birth parents, and her quest to be acknowledged by them both as their biological child. The book opens in the Nicon...

Based on David Mitchell's award-winning novel with the same name, Cloud Atlas is a sci-fi film distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures and is directed by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. The film was released at the Toronto International Film...

Parasite is a 2019 South Korean film directed by Bong Joon-ho. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, unanimously. The screenplay was written by Bong Joon-ho in collaboration with Han Jin-won, and the film stars...

Set in 1975, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again is a novel written in verse that follows ten-year-old protagonist Kim Hà and her family as they flee Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and adapt to life as refugees in Alabama.

Published in...

Her Body and Other Parties is the debut collection of some of the American author Carmen Maria Machado's best short stories. Published in 2017, it dives into the daily realities and experiences of the lives of modern women without any boundaries...