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Fifteen Dogs is the second novel in André Alexis' planned five-book series, The Quincunx Cycle—each work of which is centered around the philosophical themes of faith, love, place, power, and hatred. Specifically, Fifteen Dogs tells the story of a...

"To Build a Fire" is a prime example of the literary movement of naturalism. Naturalism was an offshoot of Charles Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's theories on evolution. In his monumental 1859 work Origin of the Species, Darwin theorized that...

Published in 2010, Sharon M. Draper’s novel Out of My Mind stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for two years. Written from the perspective of Melody Brooks, an eleven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, Out of My Mind gives a window onto...

Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial is about Josef K., a banker who is prosecuted by a court he has never heard of for a crime that is never revealed. Although K. attempts to fight the illogical accusation, the perplexing legal system steadily...

Russian author Leo Tolstoy's 1872 short story "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" is about a young merchant who is sent to a Siberian prison camp for a murder he didn't commit. After putting his faith in God, the merchant spends twenty-six years in...

Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese writer born on October 18, 1952, in Hanoi. He served as a soldier in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam War, and he came back home as one of only ten survivors in his unit of five hundred. The war had an...

The Boat is a collection of short stories heavily influenced by the author’s background and childhood experiences. Born in Vietnam, Nam Le fled to Australia with his parents while still a baby. The family was one of the many families of “boat...

A Little Life was written by Hanya Yanagihara and was published in March 2015 by Doubleday. A Little Life is Yanagihara's second novel, and due to the difficult subject matter, neither the author nor editor predicted that the novel would be...

“The Fly” was published in the The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922. At the time, Mansfield was grieving over the loss of her brother, who died in a military training accident shortly before he was to be deployed to France at the start of World War I....

John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill, a legal thriller, in 1989 while he was a practicing lawyer in Mississippi. While observing a trial in the courthouse near his practice, he witnessed the testimony of a 12-year-old who was raped and beaten, and...

The Rez Sisters is a play by Canadian playwright Tomson Highway. First performed in 1986, the play is centered on seven Native women who live on a fictional reserve called Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. It is the...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, written by J.K. Rowling. In this book, Harry struggles under the heavy responsibility to face the evil Lord Voldemort and save the people he loves most. It is...

Fire on the Mountain is a 1977 novel by Anita Desai that deals with the subjects of solitude, existentialism, and oppression of females in patriarchal Indian society. The book tells the story of Nanda Kaul, a widowed, reclusive woman who has to...

The Water Dancer is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel. It debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2019. Coates has said that he worked on the novel for a decade in “various...

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a collection of theoretical texts, memoir, and poetry, first published in 1987. Since then, it has become not just Anzaldúa’s most famous work, but a foundational text in Chicana/o, gay...

The first in a five-book series by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley presents sociopathic murderer Tom Ripley and the first of his criminal exploits centering around Italy and the carefree, rich scion Dickie Greenleaf. The novel became...

Liliana Heker's "The Stolen Party" is a short story about nine-year-old Rosaura attending a birthday party at the house where her mother Herminia works as a maid. While Herminia warns Rosaura against believing she will be accepted as an equal by...

Based on historical events, Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is a chilling tale of unsolved murder. Pollock stages the events surrounding the deaths of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden, believed to have been perpetrated by Lizzie Borden, their...

Set in the slums of Melbourne in 1919, Robert Newton's Runner follows fifteen-year-old Charlie Feehan as he drops out of school to take a job running packages and collecting money for a notorious gangster named Squizzy Taylor.

Though the job helps...

In the summer of 1741, Jonathan Edwards, a towering intellectual figure of the Great Awakening, author of books on a multitude of subjects, and one of the key ministers at the forefront of the call for a return to orthodoxy in the Puritan church,...

Lion is a 2016 film based on Saroo Brierley's autobiographical novel, A Long Way Home. The film tells the story of a 30-year-old man who was adopted at the age of five in India and now lives in Australia, who travels back to India in an attempt to...

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the debut full-length poetry collection by Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong. Vuong initially wrote the poems in the collection and assembled them for an open contest that claimed each rejection would be...

Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays written and published by the African-American author James Baldwin. The collection was published in 1955 and is made up of essays previously published in literary and political magazines. The essays...

Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire is the fourth novel in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series. Harry Potter is a book series about a young wizard who is trying to defeat Lord Voldemort. Lord Voldemort is a powerful Dark wizard who has killed many...