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This eye-opening book offers an analysis of the cross and the lynching tree as religious and cultural symbols in American history. These symbols are paralleled, connected and contrasted in the text, and are ultimately shown to reveal the dark side...

Based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, Disney's 1998 animated film Mulan takes place during the Chinese Han dynasty and follows the titular Fa Mulan as she impersonates a man in order to take the place of her ailing father and fight against the...

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan is a 2012 children's novel written in the voice of Ivan, an artistic gorilla who lives in a mall as a customer attraction. After Stella the elephant dies from neglect, Ivan comes to terms with his...

Salt to the Sea is a young-adult historical fiction novel published on February 2, 2016. It is Ruta Sepetys’s third novel. Like Sepetys’s other three novels, Salt to the Sea explores the lost and forgotten stories of history. In particular, it...

Originally published in French in 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity is the second non-fiction publication by Simone de Beauvoir. In her book, she claims that humans are naturally born "free" because of their since of self-awareness, among other...

In his 1884 satirical novella, Flatland, English school teacher Edwin Abbott contends that Victorian society is divided into distinct classes and that the main goal of everyone is to climb the social ladder as quickly as possible. However,...

Originally published in 2015, Fish in a Tree is a New York Times bestselling novel by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. The novel follows the inspiring story of Ally, a troublemaking middle-schooler who has dyslexia. Because of this, she is unable to read, and...

British author Doris Lessing wrote the short novel The Fifth Child in 1998. It tells the story of a happily married couple, Harriet and David, who already have four children, but whose lives become fractured and difficult after the birth of Ben,...

The Golden Age is a novel written by Award-winning Australian author Joan London. One of her notable works includes the award-winning Gilgamesh. The Golden Age was published in 2014 by Random House Australia Publishers. The Golden Age won the 2015...

Written by acclaimed children's author Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon (released in 2016) tells the story of a young girl named Luna. Luna, though, is special. Because she was raised by a witch and was often around magic, Luna one days...

Originally published in 1925, "The Gardener" is a story written by British-Indian author Rudyard Kipling and published in France. The story follows the life of main character Helen Turrell, who becomes pregnant out of wedlock in India, which, at...

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem is a book by Moustafa Bayoumi published in 2008. The book chronicles the story of seven Americans that had immigrated to the country from Arab nations. Living in New York City, they were deeply impacted by the...

A Hope in the Unseen is a novel written by Ron Suskind, describing the experiences of a student called Cedric Jennings as he navigates high school and college as an African American student. This novel is mostly set during the 1990s and reveals...

Originally published in 2005, A History of the World in Six Glasses is a non-fiction book by English author Thomas Standage. The book chronicles the history of humankind through six distinct beverages, beginning with beer. Beer was invented...

Ralph Waldo Emerson published a collection titled simply Essays: First Series in 1841. The book was comprised of a dozen essays and set the template for Emerson’s preference in book-length publications to come with its structure composed of...

Heroes is a novel written by Robert Cormier and was published in 1998. The novel is concerned with the impact of World War II, including the emotional, physical and psychological effects. It is also influenced by other historical events, including...

The Happiest Refugee was originally published in 2010 as a memoir by Anh Do. The memoir tells of the journey Do and his family took to escape the war-torn communist country of Vietnam. The family had to sail across the Pacific Ocean, and...

Annie Proulx wrote The Half-Skinned Deer for an anthology of short stories called Off the Beaten Path. It was inspired by a visit she had made to a preserve run by the Nature Conservancy after they had invited her to look around the park and to...

Written by husband-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky (published in September 2009) is a non-fiction book about advocacy and education. In it, Kristof and WuDunn aim to enlighten readers about the serious problems women...

"When God closes a door, he opens a window. But it's up to you to find it." So went the favorite saying of Lily Casey Smith, the indomitable frontier woman who is the protagonist of Half Broke Horses, a book penned by her granddaughter, Jeannette...

English author Susan Hill is best known for the gothic novel The Woman in Black. I'm the King of the Castle was published in 1970, and tells the story of two young boys Edmund and Charles, whose relationship is toxic at best and borders on the...

It is a horror novel, written by Stephen King, and published in 1986 by Viking Press (now Penguin Random House.) The book tells the story of a mythical creature that takes on the form of one’s worst fears, most typically a clown figure known only...

It is not known whether or not Edgar Allan Poe created the concept of an imp of the perverse or whether he simply popularized the phrase when he used it as the title and the theme of this story. Simply put, an imp of the perverse is a little...