What makes a "book of the century"? And who gets to decide which books make the cut? Over the past two seasons of Literate, we have been asking these questions while reading through the New York Public Library's 1995 list of the books of the century. Each episode, we explore one book from that...

This week we wander through The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, this long poem uses a diverse array of voices to convey a sense of disillusionment with modern life. Those voices range from the parodic to the sacred, as the poem interweaves hundreds of...

We step into a world of uncertainty, this week, with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. In this ghost story, a young woman takes up a new job as a governess, caring for two children who seem almost too good to be true... But while the governess tells a tale of ghostly visitations, her story...