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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...

The idea for prolific Irish author Sally Rooney's fourth novel, Intermezzo (2024), came during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Rooney, who had quite a bit of time on her hands, found online chess during the lockdown and became fascinated with that world....

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....

Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

Oblomov is the most famous work of prominent Russian author Ivan Goncharov, published in 1859. The novel is set in mid-19th-century Russia and is seen as a brilliant satire on Russian society, particularly the aristocracy’s lifestyle, indolence,...

The poet, playwright, teacher, lecturer, editor, and translator Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff in 1937. She is considered an integral figure in contemporary Welsh poetry, leading her to become the third National Poet of Wales in 2008 and the...

The secret to the enduring popularity of what is perhaps James Thurber’s most famous short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"—published first in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939 and then reprinted in Thurber's 1942 collection My World - and...

Published mainly in the 1830s and 1840s, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have come to represent the height of 19th-century tales of the macabre. One of the American Romantics, Poe showed an interest in the power of emotions and often sought to...