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Charles Dickens' ghost story "The Signalman" is about an unnamed narrator who takes an interest in a railway signal operator who is haunted by a specter. The specter's ambiguous warnings lead to the signalman being run over by a train.

First...

A Tempest, written in 1968, is Aimé Césaire's postcolonial adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. It follows the actions of the Shakespeare play, but makes the relation between Prospero and his fairy slaves, Ariel and Caliban, that of a...

A Little Princess is a children’s novel written by the English-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett. Published in 1905 as an adaptation of Burnett's serialized novel Sara Crewe, it is considered a classic of English-language children's...

Wonder, a story about a ten-year-old boy who lives in Manhattan and who has a rare physical deformity, was published in February of 2012 and was author R.J. Palacio's first novel.

Palacio was inspired to write Wonder after taking her son to buy...

The Ghost Bride is a critically-acclaimed novel by breakout Malaysian novelist Yangsze Choo first published by William Morrow in 2013. Set in 19th-century Malaya under British colonial rule, The Ghost Bride explores themes of tradition, love, and...

John Cheever's “The Five-Forty-Eight” was first published on April 10, 1954 in The New Yorker. Four years later, the story was reprinted as part of a collection of Cheever's short stories, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. The short story examines...

Cormac McCarthy's 2005 neo-Western novel No Country for Old Men received mixed critical reception upon its release. Critics couldn't determine how much of the novel, particularly the character of Sheriff Bell, was meant in earnest and how much of...

Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written collaboratively by W.B Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901, is a play centered around the 1798 Irish Rebellion. In the early 20th century, Ireland was still under colonial rule, and many longed for an independent Irish...

Perhaps the most well-received of T.S. Eliot’s seven plays, The Cocktail Party interpolates many essential elements from Alcestis by Euripides into a midcentury British play that takes many genre cues from British "drawing-room comedies." The play...

"The Ballot or the Bullet" is a groundbreaking speech given by civil rights pioneer Malcolm X on April 3 and 12, 1964. The speech was delivered twice—first at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and second at the King Solomon Baptist...

Published in 1983, Life and Times of Michael K is a realistic fiction novel by South African author J.M. Coetzee. The book follows the story of Michael K, a poor man living in South Africa and navigating a (fictitious) civil war during the period...

First published in 1939, and considered an early indication of Eudora Welty’s promise as a leading figure in Southern realism, “Petrified Man” has gone on to be one of the most anthologized and analyzed short stories of her extensive oeuvre.

The...

Published in June 2019, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is Ocean Vuong's debut novel. Written in the style of an epistolary novel—a letter from a young Vietnamese-American man (Little Dog) to his older, illiterate mother (Rose)—the novel explores...

Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese comprises three apparently separate storylines: the first follows a monkey deity's desire to be all-powerful; the second follows Jin Wang, a child of Chinese immigrants, as he wrestles with his...

Sam Shepard wrote Buried Child, perhaps his best-known play and the play that won him the Pulitzer in 1979, while he was the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. It is the play most widely credited with turning Shepard...

Prep is Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel. The book's plot revolves around the high-school career of Lee Fiora, a student at the fictional Ault School in Massachusetts. Unlike most prep school students, Lee comes from a middle-class background and...

Baldwin's 1965 collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, is comprised mostly of stories he previously published between 1948 and 1960. The stories touch on themes of sexuality, class, and race, in particular the experience of black...

Joker is a film directed, produced, and written by Todd Phillips (his cowriter was Scott Silver). It is based around the DC Comics villain The Joker and stars Joaquin Phoenix as the title character. Phillips cites Martin Scorsese's films Taxi...

O. Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf" is about a young artist named Johnsy who falls victim to a pneumonia epidemic that hits New York City. As Johnsy counts the ivy leaves falling off the vine outside her window, she superstitiously...

Richard Wagamese published Medicine Walk in 2014. Wagamese was an acclaimed First Nations Ojibway author most notably known for his novel Indian Horse, which was adapted into a film in 2017.

Medicine Walk is told from the perspective of Franklin...

Michèle Marineau's 1992 novel The Road to Chlifa follows Karim Nakad, a seventeen-year-old refugee from the Lebanese civil war, as he faces discrimination in his new life in Montreal, Canada while grappling with the haunting memories of his...

Called a "publishing phenomenon" by the L.A. Times, The Art of Racing in the Rain is the award-winning third novel by American author, filmmaker, and amateur car-racer Garth Stein. Published by HarperCollins in 2008, the novel remained on the New...

"Beverly Hills, Chicago" first appeared in 1949, in Brooks' second collection of poetry, Annie Allen. The poem describes the speaker's experience driving through the affluent white neighborhood of Beverly, Chicago, as someone who is neither...

"We Real Cool" first appeared in Gwendolyn Brooks' third published collection of poetry entitled, The Bean Eaters, in which she continues to explore her primary theme, the experiences of Black people in America. Though she had always been writing...