Junot Díaz first published Drown with Riverhead Books in the United States in 1996. It quickly became a national bestseller and garnered almost immediate critical acclaim. Drown is a collection of short stories that are loosely tied together...

The Selection is a young-adult dystopian romance novel by #1 New York Times-Bestselling author Kiera Cass, originally published by HarperTeen on April 24, 2012. It is the first book in the pentalogy by the same name. The Selection is followed by ...

Written for children between seven and nine (Rowling remarked that the book is a "political fairytale for slightly younger children"), The Ickabog tells the story of a fantasy land called Cornucopia, which is plagued by an evil creature known as...

On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, a luxury cruise liner thought to be “unsinkable,” collided with an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. More than 1,500 of the 2,240 passengers and crew onboard lost their lives. Just nine days later,...

Described by the acclaimed twentieth-century poet and literary critic W.H. Auden as being "modern without being too modern," Thomas Hardy is one of the most influential and important writers in English literary history. Today, nearly a century...

Educated is a memoir written by Tara Westover. The story recounts Tara's unusual upbringing as the daughter of extremist Mormon survivalists. Westover's father, referred to as "Gene" in the memoir, does not allow his seven children to go to school...

Where the Wild Things Are is a children's book published in 1963 and written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. When it was initially released, it was met with mixed reviews for its honest portrayal of child anger. Some critics argued it would...

After a decade of reading, research, and writing, Donna Tartt published her highly-anticipated third novel, The Goldfinch. The 2013 novel tells the story of Theo Decker, and centers around loss, death and the titular painting, The Goldfinch.

The...

Set in Taliban-controlled Kabul, Afghanistan, Deborah Ellis's The Breadwinner follows the story of an eleven-year-old girl who, following her father's sudden arrest, disguises herself as a boy so she may leave the house and make money to support...

The Hungry Tide was published in 2005 and written by Amitav Ghosh (born 1956), an Indian writer known for his English-language novels. Ghosh has written nine novels, and has received multiple awards.

The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans, a...

1917 tells the story of two British soldiers during World War I who are tasked by their general to deliver a message to prevent an isolated unit from attacking the German line. It was directed by Sam Mendes and stars George MacKay, Dean-Charles...

By the Bog of Cats is a 1998 play written by Irish playwright Marina Carr. Inspired by the myth of Medea, the play centers around Hester Swane, a heavy-drinking, low-class woman whose lover has left her for another woman. Now, she must face the...

In many ways, Toru Dutt's poetry sheds light on her status as a transitional or hybrid figure, situated not just at the crossroads of different cultures and traditions but also at a turning point in literary history. Within a single landscape or...

Albert Camus is one of the 20th century’s most esteemed writers, and La Peste, or The Plague (1947), is considered one of his masterpieces. Set in the North African French colony of Oran, the novel chronicles a recrudescence of the bubonic plague...

“A Wagner Matinee” was first published in the February 1904 edition of Everybody’s Magazine, a nonfiction and fiction magazine founded in 1899 by Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. Cather had a lifelong passion for Wagner's music, and many of...

Published in 1846, The German Ideology is Marx and Engels’s first public attempt to outline the basics of Marxist theory as we now understand it. Here we find both the familiar political polemics around class warfare and proletarian revolution,...