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Burnt Shadows is a novel by Pakistani-British novelist Kamila Shamsie. Published in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing, the novel follows two families over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Set in World War II, the partition of...

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

The Chairs is an absurdist play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, first performed in 1952. It details the life of an unnamed, elderly married couple as they attempt to organize a speech and look back on their life together.

The play...

John Dryden (1631-1700) was one of seventeenth-century England's best-known writers. Known for poetry, prose, drama, criticism, and translation, Dryden today remains beloved as a writer of satire in particular. He is also remembered for developing...

"How to Triumph Like a Girl" is the opening poem from Ada Limón's 2015 book Bright Dead Things. The poem is a celebration of female triumph as the speaker finds kinship between her body and the wild, animal power of racehorses. In the years...

"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is anthropologist and ethnologist Clifford Geertz's seminal work. Originally published in his book The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973, the essay is today the most recognizable of the collection. The...

Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Dr. Seuss wrote more classic books than perhaps any other children's author. Among those classic books is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which tells the story of the eponymous Grinch, a mean and...

San Andreas (2015) is a natural-disaster thriller about a search-and-rescue pilot who saves his daughter and reconciles with his ex-wife amid the chaos of the world's most destructive earthquake as it strikes the West Coast of the United States....

“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is a characteristically witty poem by the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in 1859, and wrote most of his poetry in the late nineteenth century. Although today he is best known for his poetry,...

Carpentaria is a 2006 novel by Alexis Wright about the tortured relations between white settlers and the Aboriginal Black community in the remote mudflats of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Queensland, Australia. The novel centers around...

Ada Limón's poem "Wife" appears in her 2018 book, The Carrying. The speaker reflects on her lingering discomforts with the word, "wife," and how it implies a restrictive domestic role and rigid archetype. She expressed her distaste for and...

First published in 1988, The Devil's Arithmetic is a historical fiction novel by Jane Yolen. The story revolves around Hannah Stern, a Jewish girl living in New Rochelle, New York. Tired of hearing her older relatives talk about the past,...

T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is a fantasy novel about Wart, a fatherless young boy who is mentored by the wizard Merlyn and has various adventures that prepare him to become king. First published in 1938, it is the first book in White's The...

Jason Reynolds' Long Way Down is a 2017 young-adult novel about a fifteen-year-old who sets out to avenge his brother's fatal shooting and encounters several ghosts who make him question his resolve.

Written in verse and narrated by Will Holloman,...

Ada Limón's poem "Dead Stars" was published in her 2018 book The Carrying. In it, the speaker observes stars in the night sky, thinks about the idea that humans are comprised of stardust, and imagines how people might rise to their full potential...

When I Was Puerto Rican is a memoir by Esmeralda Santiago. It was published in 1993 by Da Capo Press. The book is the first of three books that Santiago wrote about her life. The other two, Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover, cover later...

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...

Seize the Day is a novella by acclaimed American novelist Saul Bellow, published in 1958. It captured the attention and respect of critics and scholars and has since been recognized as one of the essential texts in the canon of one of the...

Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complicated plays, tells the story of a mythic king of England, Cymbeline, who reigned during the first century A.D. Its several plots trace the tribulations of the King and his royal family on...

Patricia McCormick's Sold tells the story of Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, who is sold into the Indian sex slave trade. The novel, published in 2006, was inspired by Patricia McCormick's interviews with Indian and Nepalese sex...

The Merchant of Venice was first printed in 1600 in quarto, of which nineteen copies survive. This was followed by a 1619 printing, and later an inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. The play was written shortly after Christopher Marlowe's...

Henry V was probably the greatest military leader that England ever had. He laid claim to the French throne in 1414 by invoking an English royal claim, and managed to win the Battle of Agincourt the following year against seemingly impossible...

“To an Athlete Dying Young” is one of the most famous poems by the English poet A. E. Housman. Houseman wrote at the tail end of the nineteenth century. He wrote poetry as a hobby, and his primary occupation was as a scholar of the classics, with...

Camara Laye's The Dark Child is a 1953 French-language memoir about the author's childhood in Guinea. The son of a protective mother and a mystical-minded blacksmith and goldsmith father, Laye writes with affection about Malinke-Muslim traditions...