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Published in 1928, Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is a personal essay that illustrates the author's experience of living as a Black woman. Through metaphors, controversial statements, and anecdotes, Hurston implies that she...

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is a provocative fable written by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, which was first published in Arabic in 1983. It was later translated into English from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies in 1992....

In the summer of 1937, Daphne Du Maurier’s husband was assigned as the commanding officer of the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Alexandria, Egypt. Du Maurier left her two daughters with their nanny in England and accompanied him to...

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet whose work spanned more than half a century. Throughout his career, his poetry centered the beauty of the islands where he was born, and where he lived for much of his life. His work often considers themes of...

The Witness for the Defence is a crime and mystery novel written by English author and politician A.E.W. Mason, which was published in 1913. Despite Mason being an upper-class politician, the novel still manages to capture a depth of emotion and...

Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, which concerns a difficult relationship in which both the speaker and the lover lie to each other, was initially published in 1599 in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim. The book was attributed to William...

Batman: The Killing Joke is a 1988 graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland which was conceived as a standalone origin story for the longtime hero/villain relationship between Batman and the Joker. Two different...

"The Hill We Climb" was first performed by Amanda Gorman on January 20, 2021, at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. As the youngest inaugural poet in history and the first National Youth Poet Laureate, Gorman's performance was an...

"Storm on the Island" is a poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, first published in his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist. It has been interpreted as an allegory for political tensions in Northern Ireland, though it does not allude to these...

Published in 1942, Ismat Chughtai's Urdu short story "The Quilt" ("Lihaaf") is about a young girl who is molested by her mother's adopted sister, Begum Jaan. Narrated from the perspective of the unnamed young girl, the story first focuses on Begum...

"Refugee Blues," published in 1939 by the American-English writer W.H. Auden, is a blues poem describing the experiences and struggles of a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism. The poem was published on the eve of Britain's entry into World War II,...

“Facing It” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

Komunyakaa was deployed in Vietnam from 1969-1970 as a war correspondent for the military newspaper The Southern Cross, and witnessed the war’...

Of her over 70 novels, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is her most famous, and possibly the most widely read mystery novel ever published. Published in novel form in 1934, it was first released as a serialized story in the Saturday...

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a part-autobiographical poem reflecting on the losses that the poet encountered throughout her lifetime. The nineteen-line poem is written in villanelle form and is divided into six stanzas. The poet considers the...

Published in 1914, Saki's "The Lumber Room" is a comedic short story about Nicholas, a mischievous upper-class English boy who uses his cleverness and imagination to subvert his aunt's authority.

After putting a frog in his breakfast, Nicholas has...

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a 2017 novel by Jesmyn Ward. The story follows a biracial family living in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. There are three narrators that relate the story's events in alternating chapters. The narrators are...

Frogs, or The Frogs, is one of Aristophanes's greatest comedies and is justly celebrated for its wit and keen commentary on Athenian politics and society. It is the last surviving work of Old Comedy and is thus also notable for its heralding a...

Published in 1939, Sinclair Ross's "The Painted Door" is a short story about Ann, a farmer's wife who has an affair while her husband is away during a fierce winter storm. Feeling an increasing sense of isolation, alienation, and resentment, Ann...

Despite appearing later in her career, Nights at the Circus, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1984, stands as one of the most important novels in Angela Carter’s vast oeuvre of fiction, in terms of expanding her readership and bringing...

Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology is a book written by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1943. As an existentialist philosopher, Sartre explores the ontological concepts of being from Martin Heidegger’s ...

Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper is based on his understanding of philosophy and reflection of thoughts. Popper applies his understanding of politics, science, and history to argue how people’s insights and objectives develop through a...

A Place in the Sun is a 1951 movie based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy. The film was directed by George Stevens and involves issues of sexual desires and class division. The story is based on a real incident where Chester...

Published in 2003, Jerry Spinelli's Loser is a children's novel about a boy who struggles to fit in with his peers due to his clumsiness, poor grades, and lack of self-awareness. Nicknamed "Loser" after failing to win a team race, Donald Zinkoff...

Christopher Paolini blossomed in the already fertile world of fantasy fiction in 2003 with his novel Eragon. That book would kick off what would come to be known as The Inheritance Cycle which, as of 2021, stood at four novels in total. In 2020,...