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Though her novel The Bell Jar has brought Sylvia Plath copious literary praise throughout the decades, it is not outlandish to assert that her poetry might in fact be her crowning achievement. Bold, visceral, moving, evocative, wrenching,...

After celebrating the joy and charity of Christmas, A Christmas Carol is foremost a condemnation of 19th-century Victorian England's division between the rich and poor, the Haves and Have-Nots. London was a great world power, rich from industry...

The “Spider and the Fly” and other poems is a picture book by Mary Howitt. The book’s genre is imaginary. “Spider and the Fly” is a warning narrative about flattery. Howitt personifies both the spider and the fly to caution people against falling...

Nemesis, published in 2010, chronicles the impact of the 1944 polio epidemic on a middle-class Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, is ineligible to serve in the war and instead works as the...

Age of Iron was published in 1990 and is the sixth novel written by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It was an international critical success, and although it didn't receive any of the prestigious literary awards that some of his other novels...

Although best-known for his novels, acclaimed Indian writer Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava (better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand) wrote quite a few short stories, and among these is "The Shroud," published in 1935. Telling the story of a poor...

By the time Pearl S. Buck published “The Enemy” in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half...

Arthur O’Shaughnessy was a British poet and zoologist, known also for his significant work with reptiles which would result in his name a part of scientific names of several types of reptiles. In the poetry department he is most known for his poem...

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Originally published in 2017, The Marrow Thieves is a young-adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. Critics have described the novel as dystopian, speculative fiction, science...

Phillip K. Dick was one of the most prominent American science fiction authors. Ubik is a science fiction novel published in 1969 and is revered as one of the greatest of the author’s science fiction work.

It is set in a futuristic world in the...

Bronwen Wallace was a Canadian whose work in poetry impacted many people during the last two decades. Most of his work touch on women's roles. Wallace articulates the emotions that are concealed underneath the surface of everyday activities. The...

Sarah Kay is an American poet, known in particular for her spoken word poetry. She was born in 1988 and has founded a group called V.O.I.C.E, which seeks to educate people using spoken word poetry. Kay has performed spoken word poetry herself for...

Dear Martin, published in 2017, is a novel about 17-year-old Justyce, who, after being racially profiled by a police officer, grapples with questions of police brutality and systemic racism. As he finishes his senior year, Justyce reflects on his...

Paul Laurence Dunbar published “We Wear the Mask,” one of his most celebrated poems to this day, in 1895 as part of his second collection of verse, titled Majors and Minors.

A publication that contributed to the publicity of Majors and Minors, as...

The Wild Duck (Vildanden in Norwegian) is a play by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1884 while he was living abroad in Italy, the process of writing the play initially did not go smoothly for Ibsen, largely due to the political...

The House That Jack Built is a psychological horror art film directed by Lars von Trier, and was released on 14 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival. The film stars a large ensemble cast, including notable actors Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, and...

The Lodger and Other Stories is a collection of stories written by Svava Jakobsdottir, an Icelandic author who is known for her use of magical realism, and her exploration of Icelandic culture. She specifically explores the shift the country has...

"Desiderata" is a prose-poem written in the early 1920s by writer Max Ehrman. Although it wasn't particularly well-known at the time, it gained popularity thanks to recordings in the 1960s and 1970s and is now known as an inspiring poem promoting...

The Heat of the Day is a novel written by Irish-British author, Elizabeth Bowen. The book was released in the United Kingdom in 1948. It was preceded by The Death of the Heart (1938), and followed on by A World of Love (1955).

The book follows on...

The Collected Short Stories is a collection of 49 short stories written by Satyajit Ray. Originally published in the native Bengali language in the 1960s, the collection has since been translated by Gopa Majumdar. He did an excellent job at...

Originally published in Arabic in 1964, Tayeb Salih's short story "A Handful of Dates" is about a young Sudanese boy whose loyalty to his grandfather is tested when his grandfather delights in their neighbor's financial ruin. After learning the...

Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) is the most recent poetry collection by American poet Louise Glück. Glück has said that, just before writing the poems in the collection, she was reading a lot of prose—and specifically, a lot of Iris Murdoch,...

The Czar’s Spy, often subtitled The Mystery of a Silent Love is a thriller/mystery novel written by Anglo-French journalist and author William Tufnell Le Queux, and published in 1905.

Le Queux was born on 2 July 1864 in London, UK. He had a range...