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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...

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....

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...

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...

Richard III generated a great deal of interest both during and after Shakespeare's lifetime. It was published in quarto at least five times after being performed in 1592. Richard Burbage first played Richard the Third and made the "poisonous...

The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited publishers under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, for Sylvia Plath questioned the literary value of the novel and did not believe that it was a "serious work."...

"The Necklace and Other Stories" is a collection of stories written by Maupassant in the 1870s and 1880s, first published in French (mostly in magazines) and later published in collected volumes and translated into a number of foreign languages....

“The Subjection of Women,” one of Mill’s most renowned essays, was published in 1869, and stands as one of the 19th century’s strongest calls for gender equality. In this essay, Mill argues that the inferior political status of women in comparison...

The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth) as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the Grammarian. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570. In it, the...

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's first and only novel, is a faustian story of a man who trades the purity of his soul for undying youth. It was written in 1889 and first published in the literary magazine Lippincott's Monthly in July,...

Ama Ata Aidoo published Our Sister Killjoy in 1979. Though a novel, it reflected her own experiences abroad. She explained in an interview, “I created [Sissie], it’s inevitable that a certain part of me will be reflected in her. But it is not an...

Thomas Hardy was an influential British writer and poet whose work focuses on rural life, class distinctions and conflict, and the shared human experiences of love and disappointment. “Neutral Tones,” written in 1867 and originally published in...

Amber McBride's Me (Moth) (2021) is a young-adult verse novel about Moth, a teenage girl who struggles with the grief of losing her family in a car crash. When Moth meets a boy named Sani, the two instantly connect through their shared pain and...

The novel Moby Dick was the sixth novel published by Herman Melville, a landmark of American literature that mixed a number of literary styles including a fictional adventure story, historical detail and even scientific discussion. The story of...

The novel Blackouts explores queer history through the memories of two men in a mentor-mentee relationship. Juan and nene discuss their experiences as gay men and Juan tells nene about Jan Gay and the Sex Variants book that co-opted her research...

Carol Rumens is a British poet and professor whose work is informed by history, language, origins, and the magic in the mundane. Her poem “The Émigrée,” first published in the 1983 collection Star Whisper, expresses the way that nothing—even war,...

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem is a science fiction novel that follows multiple characters, usually the scientist Wang Miao, as the people of Earth discover and confront an upcoming invasion by aliens from the planet Trisolaris.

The novel...