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"The Bean Eaters" is the title poem of Gwendolyn Brooks' third collection of poetry, published by Harpers in 1960. The poem describes an aging Black couple's ritual of sitting down and eating beans on their old, chipped plates while they silently...

D. H. Lawrence composed “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” in the winter of 1916 and completed it in January of the next year under the title “The Miracle.” The manuscript was tinkered with and revised and, of course, retitled before finally being...

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third novel in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In this book, the saga continues as Harry is faced with dementors, the soul-sucking guards of Azkaban prison that bring icy depression into the...

The 57 Bus began as an article for the New York Times Magazine, published in 2015. But the whole time Slater crafted the article and researched the case, she fantasized "writing the story in a different way, for a different audience." Slater knew...

Published in September of 1989, Bharati Mukherjee's third novel, Jasmine, tells the story of its eponymous protagonist's journey from the small village of Hasnapur, India to Jalandhar, to Florida, to New York, and eventually to Iowa, inhabiting a...

Annihilation is a darkly complex novel from author Jeff VanderMeer, the first installment of his Southern Reach Trilogy. It seems to defy categorization: it is at once speculative fiction, science fiction, thriller, and horror, while also being...

"The Lady with the Dog" was written in 1899 by Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, and was first published in the journal Russian Idea. It has often been deemed by critics to be Chekhov's answer to Anna Karenina; Lyudmila Parts calls it...

Phillip Pullman published The Golden Compass, known as Northern Lights outside of North America, in 1995. The novel is the first book in what would become a trilogy entitled His Dark Materials, which also includes The Subtle Knife and The Amber...

Philadelphia, Here I Come! is Brian Friel's breakthrough success. He wrote it in 1964 after having written a few other plays, including The Enemy Within and The Blind Mice. Philadelphia's heart-wrenching and intimate portrayal of an Irishman's...

American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis's third novel, released in 1991. The first-person narrator is a Wall Street investment banker named Patrick Bateman, who either is or imagines himself to be a prolific serial killer. Like other works which...

During the press tour for Jojo Rabbit, writer/producer/director/actor Taika Waititi described the film as an “anti-hate” satire. An irreverent and farcical Nazi comedy about a Hitler Youth member who falls in love with a Jewish girl, Jojo Rabbit...

Before there was Count Dracula, there was Carmilla. Indeed, it was Sheridan Le Fanu who introduced the vampire into the English literature tradition. Carmilla was first presented to the world in serial form, published in four editions of a...

The Dutch House is a novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2019. It tells the story of two siblings, Danny and Maeve Conroy, and how their abandonment as children leaves them reliant on each other.

The fictional Dutch House of the title is located...

Lysistrata, a comedy by Athens' greatest comedic writer, Aristophanes, debuted in Athens in the year 411 BCE, around the time when the Peloponnesian War was just beginning. The play itself centers on the beginnings of this war and the efforts of a...

Set in a dystopian near-future Britain, Alan Moore's 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta follows an anarchist revolutionary named V as he seeks vengeance against the former administrators of a concentration camp and topples the country's...

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The book consists of twelve stories that focus on the lives of Nigerians living in both Africa and in the United States. Many of the stories in the...

First performed on the London stage in 1905, Man and Superman is an extraordinary play precisely because it inverts so many of the traditional or expected roles of theater. On its surface, this play, by George Bernard Shaw, is a standard romantic...

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in American schools to be unlawful. Five years later, Tennessee Williams published Sweet Bird of Youth against a backdrop of political change; segregationist Jim Crow laws were...

Set in a World War I dugout from March 18 to March 21, 1918, R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play Journey's End follows Captain Stanhope as he deals with alcoholism and symptoms of PTSD while commanding a group of British army officers in the lead up to...

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is a play in two acts by Canadian playwright George Ryga. It is a play of significant cultural and social importance, which has been used by Indigenous activists as a means of forcing dominant structures to face the reality...

Madame Butterfly is a three-act opera by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini based on the short story of the same name penned in 1898 by John Luther Long. The short story was inspired by stories that Long's sister, Jennie Correll, told him about an...

Edward II, first performed probably between 1587-1592 and published in 1594, is one of Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe’s most famous works. Based off of the history of King Edward II, the play depicts the king’s homosexuality and love...

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” was published for the first time in the July 18, 1964 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Cheever originally conceived of it as a novel before paring it down from 150 pages to 12. In 1968, the story was...

Uglies is a young-adult science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity dystopia sometime in the future. It is the first in the Uglies trilogy.

Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old on the verge of undergoing a mandatory cosmetic surgery...