Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...

Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair...

Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938 and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to...

An aubade is a poem traditionally set at dawn or early morning, and typically about parting lovers. This “Aubade” doesn’t involve love, however, despite its fitting setting. In the poem, which uses an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, the speaker wakes up...

"Cat Person" is a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2017, which quickly went viral, attaining significant praise on the internet, especially within certain feminist circles.

The story is told from the point of view of Margot, a...

David Almond’s Skellig was published in 1998 and is considered one of the most significant works of children’s literature in the late 20th century.

Almond had already written short stories when what would be Skellig came to him. He told an...

"The House" is a poem by Warsan Shire. It was published in 2011 in Shire's first poetry collection, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It focuses on womanhood, comparing a woman's body to a house equipped with different rooms that serve...

"The Birth-Mark" is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most revered and gripping short stories. Published in the March 1843 edition of The Pioneer, the story examines human sin, evokes the perils of overweening ambition, and theorizes about gender...

The Big Lebowski is a stoner comedy and crime film from 1998 produced and directed by the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan). It follows Jeffrey "the Dude" Lebowski, an unemployed bowler and general slacker as he navigates a convoluted instance of...

“All in green went my love riding,” one of E. E. Cummings’s most celebrated poems, was published in 1923 in Tulips and Chimneys, Cummings' first published collection of poems. Written in the early years of Cummings’s career, it is perhaps one of...

"Anne Hathaway" appears in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems The World’s Wife, published in 1999. This collection moved women in well-known stories and myths to the foregrounds of their stories—spaces previously occupied by men. "Anne...

Published in 1958, The Guide is a novel by Indian author R.K. Narayan set in his fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. It follows the life of an Indian man, Raju, as he evolves throughout his life to become one of the most prominent holy men in...

Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox on commission from the Festival of Two Worlds at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1959. Its first production took place in New York the following year. The Sandbox is linked to a longer play by Albee titled The...

A House for Mr. Biswas was V. S. Naipaul’s fourth novel, following three earlier efforts that were essentially all comedies of manners set in the author’s homeland of Trinidad. This predominantly comic novel, which made Naipaul a major figure in...

Susan Glaspell’s "A Jury of Her Peers" is the short-story version of her play Trifles, which was staged a year before she published "Jury." Essentially the exact same story in two different literary forms, both tell a fictionalized but accurate...

Y Tu Mamá También is a 2001 Mexican drama directed by Academy Award–winning director Alfonso Cuaron. The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) at the time of its release. Written by...