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"Through the Tunnel" is a short story by British-Zimbabwean writer Doris Lessing. Originally published in The New Yorker magazine in August of 1955, it would be republished two years later in a highly-regarded collection of Lessing's short fiction...

"As imperceptibly as Grief" is a poem by Emily Dickinson about the end of summer, the subtlety of the passage of time, and the loss that these changes create. It was written in 1865 and published in 1891. The poem deals with many of Dickinson's...

Shaun Tan's The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel about a man who immigrates to a foreign land to establish a better life for his family. The book's photo-realistic illustrations depict an invented world that blends the familiar with the...

"A Bird, came down the Walk" is a poem by Emily Dickinson, in which the speaker carefully observes a crow as it eats, drinks, and then flies away when she offers a crumb. It was written in 1862 and first published in 1891 as part of the second...

Since 1961, Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels, 18 poetry books, and 9 collections of her short fiction, as well as many other works. In 2000, Atwood won the Booker Prize for her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, and followed this up with Oryx...

Frederick Douglass was a former slave who escaped slavery in Maryland and ultimately became the leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He gave incisive speeches that quickly gained both attention and notoriety, and he...

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes marks the first entry in the Hunger Games series in nearly a decade. It is a prequel to the first Hunger Games novel and tells the story of the 10th Hunger Games. The plot follows Coriolanus Snow (who would later...

Boy: Tales of Childhood is an autobiographical book by children’s author Roald Dahl. Published in 1984, the book focuses on Dahl's memories from his childhood and adolescence in Wales, England, and Norway in the 1920s and 1930s. The story begins...

I, Being born a Woman and Distressed is a 1923 sonnet by playwright and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in which a woman describes her simultaneous desire for and dislike of an unidentified addressee. The poem was first...

"I taste a liquor never brewed" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1860 and first published in 1861. It appeared, anonymously and with major alterations, in the Springfield Republican and was one of the few poems published in Dickinson's...

"Pity Me Not (Sonnet 29)" is a 1923 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay in which a speaker attempts to come to terms with a recent heartbreak.

Millay's speaker repeats the phrase "Pity me not" in an attempt to reframe romantic troubles as natural,...

Every Day, published in 2012, is a Young Adult novel by David Levithan. The novel tells the story of A, a disembodied spirit who wakes up in the body of a different person each day. A has no control over the gender, race, location, or appearance...

Funny Boy is the first novel published by openly gay Sri Lankan writer Shyam Selvadurai. Of mixed Tamil and Sinhala heritage, Selvadurai joined his family in their decision to immigrate to Canada in 1983 in the wake of rioting stimulated partly by...

Samson Agonistes is a closet drama published in 1671 by English poet and political activist John Milton. It appeared alongside Milton's Paradise Regained, a poem that follows his most famous work, the epic Paradise Lost. Milton declared Samson...

"No, Thank You, John" is an 1862 poem by the English writer Christina Rossetti in which a woman addresses and negotiates with a man who continues to pursue her despite her rejections. It was originally published in Rossetti's collection Goblin...

Frank Herbert’s Dune is a science fiction novel about Paul Atreides, the 15-year-old son of Duke Leto who travels to the desert planet Arrakis. After House Atreides is overthrown, Paul becomes a messiah-like figure to the native people of Arrakis,...

Scythe (2016) by Neal Shusterman is the first book in the New York Times–bestselling Arc of a Scythe series. It is set in a distant future where advances in technology have rendered death by natural causes obsolete, and where society is organized...

"The Way Up to Heaven" is a short story by Roald Dahl, penned in 1954 for The New Yorker magazine. It was later included in a volume of short stories published in 1960, entitled Kiss Kiss. While Dahl's work has a reputation for dark imagery and...

Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network is a 2010 drama film loosely based on controversies surrounding the creation of Facebook.

In the fall of 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is an intelligent but arrogant Harvard sophomore. When...

"Cousin Kate" is a mid-nineteenth-century poem by Christina Rossetti, in which a suffering woman tells the tale of her subjugation at the hands of a powerful lord and her betrayal by a cousin. Throughout the work, Rossetti plays with readers'...

"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1865 and first published in 1866. It is one of the few poems that was published, anonymously, in Dickinson's lifetime by a contemporary literary magazine. Born in 1830,...

Judith Wright is considered one of the most notable Australian poets in the country’s history, revered for her cerebral and evocative poems that explore the complexity of Australia’s natural landscape and its colonization by Europeans. Michael...

A fourteen-volume epic, The Prelude is William Wordsworth's account of his own life and growth as a poet, published in various editions between 1799 and 1850. Intended to be the forerunner to another epic work entitled The Recluse, this work is...

The Tale of Sinuhe (or The Story of Sinuhe) is an Ancient Egyptian text composed around 1875 BC. Concerning the life of a fictional man who flees Egypt and becomes a hero abroad, it is one of the earliest known literary texts.

Translated from...