10,807 articles
Burlesque
Burlesque: comic treatment of serious subjects, from Italian burlesco (burla, jest), entering English 1656; covers the literary genre, Victorian and American variety theater, striptease-era burlesque, and the 1990s neo-burlesque revival.
Burmese novel
The Burmese novel is the prose fiction form of Burmese (Myanmar) literature, emerging in the early twentieth century under British rule; the first two novels appeared in 1904.
Burmese short story
The Burmese short story (wutthu to) is a prose fiction genre in the Burmese language, first established with Shwe U Daung's 1917 story in Thuriya magazine.
Burning Orchards
Burning Orchards (Ayrvogh aygestanner) is the only novel of Armenian writer Gurgen Mahari, published in 1966 and set in Van before the 1915 Armenian defense.
Burnt Norton
"Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1936 and later the opening poem of Four Quartets, which it set the five-part form for.
Buro Shaliker Ghare Ro
Buro Shaliker Ghare Ro (বুড়ো শালিকের ঘাড়ে রোঁ; New Feathers on an Old Bird) is an 1860 Bengali farce by Michael Madhusudan Dutt satirizing a pious but lascivious zamindar.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a 2025 standalone novel by V. E. Schwab. It follows three women turned into vampires across three different historical settings.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan
Bushido: The Soul of Japan is a 1900 book by Nitobe Inazō that presents bushidō, the way of the warrior, as an ethical system to Western readers.
Bustan
Bustan (بوستان), also known as Sa'di-nama, is a moralistic and anecdotal Persian verse work of some 4,100 couplets by the poet Sa'di of Shiraz, completed in 1257.
Bustan al-Salatin
Bustan al-Salatin is a 17th-century Malay work of universal Islamic history and princely instruction, written in Aceh by the scholar Nuruddin al-Raniri, begun in 1638 at the command of Sultan Iskandar Thani.
Busuanzi: Ode to Plum Blossom
Busuanzi: Ode to Plum Blossom (卜算子·咏梅) is a Chinese ci poem by the Southern Song poet Lu You, an allegory of political isolation and integrity.
Butcher's Crossing
Butcher's Crossing is a 1960 revisionist western novel by John Williams, also the author of Stoner. Will Andrews, an Emerson-inspired Harvard dropout, joins a buffalo-hunting expedition into the Colorado Rockies that ends in slaughter, snowbound winter, and a changed world. A 2022 film adaptation starring Nicolas Cage followed.
Butter (バター) (novel)
Butter (バター) is a 2017 novel by Asako Yuzuki, inspired by the Konkatsu Killer case, following journalist Rika Machida's interviews with killer-cook Manako Kajii; its 2024 Polly Barton translation won Waterstones Book of the Year 2024 and the British Book Awards Debut Fiction 2025.
Buying a Classmate Once a Week
Buying a Classmate Once a Week (Shuukura, 週に一度クラスメイトを買う話) is a yuri light novel series by Usa Haneda and U35, published by KADOKAWA's Fantasia Bunko. Miyagi pays classmate Sendai 5,000 yen weekly for orders; 10 volumes, manga by Migihara, Yen Press English release from October 2026.
Büyük Saat
Büyük Saat ("The Great Clock") is the collected-works volume of Turkish poet Turgut Uyar, first published in 1984 and expanded in 2002 to gather all his poems.
By die Monument
By die Monument is the debut poetry collection of the Afrikaans poet Totius, published in 1908 to mourn the Boer women and children who died in the Second Boer War.
By the Grace of the Gods (神達に拾われた男)
By the Grace of the Gods (神達に拾われた男, Kami-tachi ni Hirowareta Otoko) is Roy's isekai slow-life light novel from Shōsetsuka ni Narō, published by Hobby Japan with manga and a 2020 MAHO FILM anime; 4.5 million copies by 2023.
By the Pen
By the Pen (Nūn va'l-qalam) is a 1961 historical novel and political allegory by the Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, translated into English in 1988.
By the Right of Memory
By the Right of Memory (По праву памяти) is the last poem of Russian Soviet poet Alexander Tvardovsky, reflecting on Stalin-era repressions and his exiled father.
Bygone Days
Bygone Days (Oʻtkan kunlar) is a historical novel by the Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy, written in 1918–1920 and widely regarded as the first novel in Uzbek literature.
Bylina
A bylina (былина), also called starina by performers, is a Russian folk epic song of heroic bogatyrs of the 11th to 16th centuries, first recorded in the 19th century.
Byomkesh Bakshi (ব্যোমকেশ বক্সী)
Byomkesh Bakshi is a fictional Bengali detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. He solves intricate cases in Kolkata using logic, and his stories have been adapted for film and television.
Byronic hero
Byronic hero: literary archetype named for Lord Byron, first seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; a brooding, arrogant, morally ambiguous outcast with magnetic charm, descended from Gothic villains and Miltonic Satan, and continued in Heathcliff, Rochester, and modern film and TV antiheroes.
Byzantine romance
Byzantine romance is Greek narrative fiction of the Byzantine Empire telling of lovers separated and reunited, in a 12th-century learned revival and later vernacular romances.
C. Auguste Dupin
C. Auguste Dupin is Edgar Allan Poe's fictional Parisian amateur detective, the first sleuth of detective fiction, appearing in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844), and modeling Sherlock Holmes.
Ca dao
Ca dao is a genre of Vietnamese folk poetry expressing the feelings of ordinary working people, transmitted orally and usually composed in the six-eight lục bát verse form.
Cædmon's Hymn
Cædmon's Hymn, a nine-line Old English praise poem by the seventh-century Whitby herdsman Cædmon, is the oldest surviving English poem with a known author, preserved via Bede's Latin paraphrase and later manuscripts, including a ninth-century copy rediscovered in Rome in 2026.
Caged Bird
"Caged Bird" is a 1983 poem by Maya Angelou contrasting a free bird with a caged bird that sings of freedom, as a metaphor for racial inequity.
Cahokia Jazz
Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford's alternate-history detective novel (Faber UK 2023, Scribner US), set in 1922 where indigenous Cahokia survived as an industrial metropolis; Sidewise Award winner featuring detective Joe Barrow and the invented language Anopa.
Caigentan
Caigentan (菜根譚, "Vegetable Root Discourse") is a late Ming collection of aphorisms on self-cultivation, compiled around 1591 by Hong Yingming, blending Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist teaching.