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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 more than one hundred years of history of the film industry, few three-hour films have garnered the level of critical and financial success as Sir Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, which was released in July 2023 after languishing for years...

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...

The Most is a contemporary novel by American author Jessica Anthony. Published by Little, Brown & Company in 2024, the novel explores a marriage on the brink of collapse. Set in 1957 in Newark, Delaware, Kathleen Beckett is a former tennis...

Martyr! is a novel by Iranian American poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar. It was published in 2014 by Knopf Publishing Group. In his debut novel, Akbar incorporates his poetry prowess and takes a crack at literary fiction. A New York Times bestseller,...

Ghostroots is a collection of short stories by Nigerian writer 'Pemi Aguda. It was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2024. In her debut collection, Aguda reimagines the city of Lagos, full of chaos and the supernatural, in twelve gripping...

The Lives of Lee Miller is a biographical memoir by British photographer Antony Penrose, the son of Lee Miller. It was published in 1985 and later in 1995 by Thames & Hudson. Elizabeth "Lee Miller" Penrose was born in 1907 in New York. At...

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a historical book by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. It was published in Hebrew in 2011 by Dvir Publishing House. The book was later translated into English in 2014 and released by Random House and...

Impossible Creatures is a fantasy fiction novel written by Katherine Rundell, a multi-award-winning British author known for her children’s fiction. It was published on September 14, 2023. Rundell has been celebrated for her previous works like ...

Most likely written between 750 and 650 B.C., The Odyssey is an epic poem about the wanderings of the Greek hero Odysseus following his victory in the Trojan War (which, if it did indeed take place, occurred in the 12th-century B.C. in Mycenaean...

In this book from award winner Rita Bullwinkle, written in 2024, eight young girls who dream of becoming world-class boxers stories' are told. To tell their story, Bullwinkle utilizes flashbacks, going back and forth between past and present....

Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional, which was published in late 2023, tells the story of a young woman who lives in the city and is unhappy with her life. In an attempt to reconnect with her roots and rediscover who she truly is, she decides...

Hirsham Matar's My Friends was published in 2023 and tells the story of a young man named Khaled, who grew up in the unstable streets of Benghazi, Libya. There, Khaled learns the story of a man who gets eaten by a cat. After learning more about...

Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep was published by Simon and Schuster in mid-2024. The novel is set in the Netherlands, and is set in 1961, years after the end of World War II. The destruction caused by the war, including building damage and bomb...

Samantha Harvey's Orbital was published in late 2023 by Atlantic Monthly Press. Harvey's novel follows six men and women who are travelling across space and time. Although these astronauts at the center of the novel come from vastly different...