Over a thousand years ago, a writer (or writers) penned an epic poem about a warrior named Beowulf who must defeat an evil monster (the story is replete with power struggles, lots of killing and, yes, ...

Many ancient texts are the work of multiple authors that have been mashed up into one story over the course of generations. Works like The Iliad and The Odyssey ascribed to the blind poet Homer are ...

Juneau-based poet Emily Wall has been working on a book of birth poems for six years. She collected birth stories from as many different people as she could, asking participants to recall specific ...

William Cowper (1731–1800) was a poet and a madman. Which is a less-common combination than one might suppose. Oh, sure, there’s Cowper’s contemporary, Christopher Smart (a fragment of whose “Jubilate ...

Protestors gather in memory of Refaat Alareer and call for an end to Israeli occupation Photo by Andy Soloman/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Refaat’s poem “If I Must Die” has been shared ...

English is a tricky language to learn. Native speakers may take this for granted, failing to realize how intricate-and inconsistent-many of its pronunciation rules are. For instance, why do heart, ...

In a journal kept in 1798, when she and her famous brother William lived at Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) recorded a March day spent, as so often, ...

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Teenagers have ...

About a decade ago, when I was an editor at The New York Times Book Review, we left the name of the reviewer off a cover review. The book’s title and author’s name were there (“Bismarck: A Life,” by ...

The chapter-wise PDFs provided here follow the updated content released by the National Council of Educational Research and ...