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White Noise was published in 1985 to great critical acclaim; it won the National Book Award and, more importantly, opened up DeLillo's oeuvre to new readers. More than anything, it established DeLillo alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the most...

Fire & Blood is a fantasy book by author George R. R. Martin, first published in 2018. Written as a historical text within the world of Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice universe, the book chronicles the history of House Targaryen, the ruling...

To a Shade is a 1916 poem first published in W.B. Yeats's collection Responsibilities and Other Poems. In this twenty-six-line work, Yeats voices anger and resentment towards Dublin's middle classes on behalf of two historical figures: the late...

Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë's only novel, and it is considered the fullest expression of her highly individual poetic vision. It contains many Romantic influences: Heathcliff is a very Byronic character, though he lacks the self pity that...

12 Angry Men has had a long history of production and revision, from short teleplay to major Broadway productions. Reginald Rose first found inspiration for 12 Angry Men when he served on a jury in a manslaughter case, over which the jurors fought...

"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, originally published in the 1893 collection The Rose. The poem features a speaker who addresses an unnamed listener in the second person. This speaker imagines the listener's future, and...

The Midnight Library is a novel by British author Matt Haig, published in 2020. The book explores the idea of unlived lives through the story of a woman named Nora Seed, who struggles to find meaning in her daily life.

The book follows Nora as she...

Pigeon English (2011) is author Stephen Kelman's debut novel. The text follows the story of Harrison "Harri" Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanaian immigrant who tries to solve the murder of a London boy. Kelman was inspired to write Pigeon English ...

Heroes and Saints is a play written by playwright Cherrie Moraga. It was first performed in 1992. Although set in the fictional town of McLaughlin, Moraga draws from the real-life case of McFarland, California where high exposure to pesticides...

Ada Limón was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, a home she would leave but look back fondly on during her poetic career. Limón's interest in creative writing grew at the University of Washington, where as an undergraduate she studied theatre in...

Colson Whitehead is one of the most acclaimed and awarded American writers at work today. To date, he has won the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a prestigious MacArthur Genius...

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy written by William Shakespeare which, tradition dictates, was composed at the request of Queen Elizabeth I. The play premiered in 1597 with publication occurring in 1602. Were it not for the appearance of ...

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a film about the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial France in the 1950s. Shot in documentary style with a cast of non-professional actors, the film depicts the guerrila attacks of...

“Barn Owl” (1969) is the first part of a two-part poem (a “diptych”) by Gwen Harwood, called “Father and Child.” As the name of the diptych indicates, “Father and Child” explores the relationship between a child and her father. In “Barn Owl,” the...

Crying in H Mart is a memoir by author and singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner. It recounts her relationship with her mother, particularly as it relates to food and Korean culture.

The memoir examines Zauner's close relationship with her mother,...

Shakespeare's principal source for the story of Coriolanus is a history written by Plutarch, of a Coriolanus who supposedly lived in ancient Rome. Shared with this source material is a concern for the overlap between virtue and valour; whereas, in...

X: A Fabulous Child's Story is author Lois Gould's 1972 short story (which was later adapted into a picture book in 1978). It tells the story of the eponymous child called X, who is raised by their parents as part of an experiment which allows...

"September 1913" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written on the occasion of the 1913 Dublin lock-out dispute between Dublin's workers and the merchants and shopkeepers who made up the city's...

"The End of Poetry" is the final poem in Ada Limón's sixth book, The Hurting Kind (2022). Limón, considered "one of America's preeminent poets" by Publishers Weekly and named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, takes an ironic approach in this poem:...

The Inheritance of Loss is author Kiran Desai's second novel, published in 2006 by Atlantic Monthly Press and Hamish Hamilton. The Inheritance of Loss won numerous accolades, including the 2006 Booker Prize, the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award,...

Les Belles-Soeurs is a two-act play by Canadian writer Michael Tremblay. Written in a naturalistic style, the story follows one night in the home of Germaine Lauzon, a housewife who is hosting a small get-together. The course of the evening...

Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed was published in 1974 to great acclaim; it is considered a landmark work of social history and a core part of the extensive body of work on the Salem Witch Trials. They root the...

Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) is a silent film about Chaplin's iconic Tramp character raising a child he finds abandoned. Chaplin wrote, produced, and starred in the film, which was his feature-length directorial debut.

The film begins with a...

Jerry Craft's New Kid is a graphic novel about a Black seventh grader who struggles to adjust to the upscale, mostly white private school in which his mother has enrolled him. New Kid made headlines in 2021 when a Texas school district pulled the...