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"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...

The Alice books were written during the Victorian era, a time now remembered for its stifling propriety and constrictive morals. Carroll had something of an outsider's perspective on this world; he was painfully shy, and he often stuttered. His...

The Alchemist is one of the most important literary phenomenons of the 20th century, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The book has been translated into over 67 languages and tops the all-time best-seller list in 18 countries. The...

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's first novel, published in 1813. Some scholars also consider it one of her most mature novels.

Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions in 1796, at the age of twenty-one. She...

John Steinbeck wrote The Pearl during the time in which he was at the height of his fame. He had completed The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was renowned and reviled as a subversive, unpatriotic man who...

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and...

Published in 1967 by Viking Press, The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first novel. The rivalry between the "greasers" and the "socs" was based on events in her own high school, the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton began writing the...

Though her novel The Bell Jar has brought Sylvia Plath copious literary praise throughout the decades, it is not outlandish to assert that her poetry might in fact be her crowning achievement. Bold, visceral, moving, evocative, wrenching,...

After celebrating the joy and charity of Christmas, A Christmas Carol is foremost a condemnation of 19th-century Victorian England's division between the rich and poor, the Haves and Have-Nots. London was a great world power, rich from industry...

Nemesis, published in 2010, chronicles the impact of the 1944 polio epidemic on a middle-class Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, is ineligible to serve in the war and instead works as the...

Age of Iron was published in 1990 and is the sixth novel written by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It was an international critical success, and although it didn't receive any of the prestigious literary awards that some of his other novels...

Although best-known for his novels, acclaimed Indian writer Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava (better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand) wrote quite a few short stories, and among these is "The Shroud," published in 1935. Telling the story of a poor...

By the time Pearl S. Buck published “The Enemy” in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half...

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Originally published in 2017, The Marrow Thieves is a young-adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. Critics have described the novel as dystopian, speculative fiction, science...

Dear Martin, published in 2017, is a novel about 17-year-old Justyce, who, after being racially profiled by a police officer, grapples with questions of police brutality and systemic racism. As he finishes his senior year, Justyce reflects on his...

Paul Laurence Dunbar published “We Wear the Mask,” one of his most celebrated poems to this day, in 1895 as part of his second collection of verse, titled Majors and Minors.

A publication that contributed to the publicity of Majors and Minors, as...

The Wild Duck (Vildanden in Norwegian) is a play by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1884 while he was living abroad in Italy, the process of writing the play initially did not go smoothly for Ibsen, largely due to the political...

Originally published in Arabic in 1964, Tayeb Salih's short story "A Handful of Dates" is about a young Sudanese boy whose loyalty to his grandfather is tested when his grandfather delights in their neighbor's financial ruin. After learning the...

Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) is the most recent poetry collection by American poet Louise Glück. Glück has said that, just before writing the poems in the collection, she was reading a lot of prose—and specifically, a lot of Iris Murdoch,...

Favel Parrett's 2011 novel Past the Shallows is about two brothers, Harry and Miles, who in the wake of their mother's and uncle's deaths must live with their abusive father while repressing memories that threaten to reveal the truth of how their...

Thought to be one of Selma Lagerlöf's earliest works, "The Rat Trap" is a short story that was likely written in the 1880s, before excerpts of Lagerlöf's first novel Gösta Berling's Saga were published in a Swedish weekly publication. The story...

Louise Erdrich's novel The Night Watchman is not just close to her heart because she wrote it; it tells the story of her Native American ancestors who, in the early 1950s, fought against a congressional bill that, in an Orwellian turn of phrase,...

Nadine Gordimer once again tackled the issue of apartheid in South Africa through metaphor and symbolism in her short story “Once Upon a Time.” First published in a shorter version in 1988 in the Weekly Mail, the standard full-length tale appeared...