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Donna Barba Higuera's The Last Cuentista was published in October 2021 to great fanfare. A work of science fiction, The Last Cuentista follows a twelve-year-old girl named Petra Peña, who lives on an Earth beset by terrible, tragic conditions...

The Last Mapmaker is an adventure story for middle-grade readers written by Christina Soontornvat and published in 2023. Although set entirely within a fantasy world created in the mind of the author, the story has strong thematic and historical...

Kim by Rudyard Kipling was first published serially in McClure's Magazine and Cassell's Magazine. It was later published as a book by Macmillan and Co. Ltd. in October 1901. The story takes place in the late 19th century, after the Second Afghan...

“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” is Immanuel Kant’s famous essay published in 1784. In this essay, he explains what enlightenment is, and ways to achieve it. It is one of the most debated essays on political philosophy. Kant...

"The Mountain" is a 1952 poem by Elizabeth Bishop. First published in Poetry magazine, this work was not included in any volume of poetry during Bishop's lifetime. It is written from the perspective of a speaker trying to make sense of herself and...

“To Althea, from Prison” is a poem by the English poet Richard Lovelace. It is about the poet’s experience in prison for his support of King Charles I. This occurred at a time in England when pro-royalty and pro-parliament factions were in...

Alan Gratz's Ground Zero (2021) is a young-adult historical novel about an American boy who escapes the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an Afghan girl who tries to stop her brother from joining the Taliban. The separate...

Flowers for Algernon was originally published as a short story in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction, the highest prize for a short story in the science fiction field. Keyes says that the...

As a poet, Robert Frost was greatly influenced by the emotions and events of everyday life. Within a seemingly banal event from a normal day—watching the ice weigh down the branches of a birch tree, mending the stones of a wall, mowing a field of...

The Canterbury Tales is at once one of the most famous and most frustrating works of literature ever written. Since its composition in late 1300s, critics have continued to mine new riches from its complex ground, and started new arguments about...

Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter is considered Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous novel--and the first quintessentially American novel in style, theme, and language. Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts, the novel centers around...

Twelfth Night is one of the most commonly performed Shakesperean comedies, and was also successful during Shakespeare's lifetime. The first surviving account of the play's performance comes from a diary entry written early in 1602, talking about...

Cervantes is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. Often, Cervantes is compared to Shakespeare. Both men have become "national literary treasures" glowing during "golden ages" of literature. Cervantes was writing along aside a number...

The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serialized novel in Collier's Weekly. Robert J. Collier, whose father had founded the magazine, had just become editor. At the time, James was already a well-known author, having already...

Emily Dickinson wrote close to 1800 poems in her lifetime. Her poems are often extremely short, waste no words, and subvert the traditional forms of the day. She is also fond of the dash as a tool to signify a pause or provide emphasis. Her poems,...

"Filling Station" is a poem by the twentieth-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. First published in her 1965 collection Questions of Travel, the work mines questions of love, kinship, and connection. It takes place at a filling station (i.e....

The Summer I Turned Pretty is a young-adult romance novel written by American author Jenny Han. It was published by Simon & Schuster in 2009 and it is the first book in The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy. The trilogy includes the sequels It’s...

Andrew Waterhouse was a British poet and environmentalist whose work dealt with relationships, emotions, and the natural world. His poem "Climbing My Grandfather," originally published in his 2000 collection In, uses an extended metaphor about...

Ruth Sepetys' I Must Betray You is a historical thriller set in communist Romania during the late 1980s. The young-adult novel focuses on the "citizen spy network" that emerged during the fall of Soviet regimes, following seventeen-year-old...

Harlem Shuffle is a novel by American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. Set in New York in the years 1959, 1961, and 1964, the novel depicts the life of a small-business owner who gets embroiled in criminal activities.

Ray Carney...

Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface (2023) follows the story of June Hayward, a young white woman who has faced years of bitter failure while trying to break into publishing as a fiction writer. June's lack of success is contrasted by the...

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet, playwright, and actress who challenged the social norms of the early twentieth century. Her poem "First Fig," published in her 1920 collection A Few Figs From Thistles, concerns the intense and...

Survival in Auschwitz is a memoir written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was imprisoned in one of the Nazis' infamous death camps from 1944 through to the fall of the Third Reich in late 1945. Levi states that he did not write the book just to...

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a magical-realist novel about a Tokyo cafe that offers customers the opportunity to travel through time.

The book is divided into four parts. The first section focuses on a woman who wants to go...