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First published as Ice Candy Man in 1988, Cracking India tells the story of the Partition of India. This historical event occurred in 1947 when the British colony of India was split into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. The story is...

Sherman Alexie's first book, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992 by an independent press, and Alexie was 26 years old at the time. His work received critical acclaim and attracted a great deal of attention from mainstream...

Around eighty-three million people speak Marathi, the official language of the South-Western region of India. Silence! The Court is in Session (Shanatata! Court Chalu Aahe!) is a play written in the Marathi language by playwright Vijay Tendulkar;...

Devil on the Cross is a novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, originally written and published in 1980 under the name Caitani Mutharabaini in the Gĩkũyũ language. The following year, it was translated to English by the author himself, and it was published...

“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is one of Leo Tolstoy’s most gripping and affecting short stories. Published in 1886, the story examines the futility of chasing wealth, depicts the perils of greed and pride, and condemns corrupt economic...

Oliver Twist was first published in 1837 in serial format, in Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was editing at the time. Oliver Twist was Dickens’s second novel and his first real social novel, critiquing the harm public institutions inflicted...

Frank Stockton's short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" first published in 1882, tells the story of a "semi-barbaric" princess who is thrown into a difficult situation: having to decide whether her lover will marry another woman, or face a ravenous...

While Langston Hughes wrote a myriad of plays, short stories, and essays, he is primarily known for his poetry, especially the verses he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars and critics regularly refer to him the “African American Poet...

The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is one of the most prominent pieces of sociological American literature, and one of the most important pieces of African-American literature. Previously published in Atlantic Monthly, the work is a...

Hayavadana is a 1971 play by Indian writer Girish Karnad. It tells the story of best friends Devadatta and Kapila, and their love, Padmini, as well as that of a man in the story with the face of a horse (the title of the okat means “one with a...

Published in 1819, The Vampyre is a novella of romantic, gothic, vampire fiction written by John William Polidori, a young physician who worked for the famous poet Lord Byron. In the novella, Aubrey, a young, wealthy orphan, watches his loved ones...

Directed by New Zealand-born Taika Waititi, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) tells the story of a young man named Ricky Baker, who gets sent to live with a couple named Hector and Bella Faulkner after exhausting nearly every other option for a...

The Rabbits is a 1999 picture book that depicts rabbits invading a country and displacing the indigenous marsupial population. An allegory for the British colonization of Australia, the story shows how the rabbits' and marsupials' initial...

Published in 2000, Fever 1793 is Laure Halse Anderson’s novel about an epidemic of yellow fever that struck the city of Philadelphia in 1793. The novel is a work of historical fiction: it features a blend of real events and historical figures with...

Whitman published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror, but it wasn't until years later that he decided to leave his career as a newspaper editor and become a full-time poet. Around 1850, he began to write what would become Leaves of...

"Story of Your Life" is an award-winning science fiction novella by acclaimed short story writer Ted Chiang. The approximately 50-page-long work was first published in 1998 in the second volume of the Starlight anthology. It was then reprinted in...

Mansfield Park, considered the author's most ambitious novel, was published anonymously, as were all of Jane Austen's novels, in 1814. While Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are considered, as one critic remarks "the gay offsprings of...

Todd Strasser's "On the Bridge" is a short story about a teenage boy whose desire to be like his cool friend results in a violent confrontation that exposes the friend's cowardice and pathological lying.

While smoking his first cigarette on a...

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society....

In January 1993, Jon Krakauer published an article in Outside magazine about the death of Chris McCandless, a young Emory graduate who had donated all of his money to charity, gotten rid of all his belongings, changed his name, and, in April 1992,...

Born a Crime is the first book written by Trevor Noah, who is better known as a comedian and actor. The comedic memoir was first published in November 2016. It received mostly favorable critical reviews, and it also became a New York Times...

Gulliver's Travels, a misanthropic satire of humanity, was written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift. Like many other authors, Swift uses the journey as the backdrop for his satire. He invents a second author, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who narrates and...

Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and...

"The name is Great Expectations. I think a good name?" Dickens to his editor before he started publishing the novel.

When Dickens started his thirteenth novel , Great Expectations, in 1860, he was already a national hero. He had come from humble...