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Matilda is a novel written by the famed children’s author Roald Dahl. It was first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape in London. The book was illustrated by Dahl’s frequent collaborator Quentin Blake. It has been made into an audiobook, a feature...

Dracula. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Jane Eyre, The Fall of the House of Usher, Rebecca, and The Haunting of Hill House. That Hound of the Baskervilles scaring people out on the moors. Tim Burton’s career. Joy Division and New Order. All of these...

My Children! My Africa! is a two-act play written by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright who has written over 30 plays. There are only three characters in the play: a white South African teenage girl, a black South African teenage boy,...

News from Nowhere is a utopian novel written by British author William Morris. Morris was a founding member of the Socialist League, an organization founded in 1885 on the tenets of socialism, a political and economic ideology that advocates for...

Waiting for the Barbarians is a political allegory about the paranoia at the roots of imperial narratives and the blood lust of colonial violence. Written during the apartheid era in South Africa, the novel is a heart of darkness fable, reflecting...

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book written by James W. Loewen. It was first published in 1995 and then republished in 2008. It tells the story of how history is taught in the United States, revealing how the many inaccuracies, omissions, and biases...

“The Interlopers” first appeared in the magazine The Bystander in 1912 and again in The Toys of Peace and Other Papers (1919), a collection of short stories published posthumously and compiled by Saki’s friend, Rothay Reynolds. The story features...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by playwright Jack Thorne, directed by John Tiffany, and based on an original story by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The story begins nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts in the...

It is hard to overstate the impact of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. It is a canonical text not only in French literature and modernism, but in the history of European art. It influenced innumerable poets, novelists, artists, and critics in...

Written and published in 1777, the play The School for Scandal is considered by many to be the greatest comedy of manners.

Written by the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the play became successful almost immediately and is a perfect...

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a children’s book written in 1968 by famed author Roald Dahl. Its main characters are a number of personified animals, including the Mr. Fox of the title. The story follows his adventures as he tries to outwit the farmer who...

“The Overcoat”, published in 1842, is a short story by Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russian writer of plays, short stories and novels. Though Gogol is sometimes described as a realist writer, “The Overcoat” contains surreal, exaggerated and...

Fittingly, George Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language” is accurately described by its title. The essay is about the connection between politics and poor uses of language. It presents an argument for clear, simple, unpretentious...

Fantomina is a novel written by Eliza Haywood in 1725. The book mainly revolves around an unnamed character who becomes intrigued by the men she sees in a playhouse in London. She then pretends to be a prostitute and enjoys talking to a man called...

Written and published in 1587, the play Tamburlaine the Great was well received by English society. Part I was originally a single play; Christopher Marlowe wrote Part II a year later due to the initial play’s popularity.

Along with his...

Lady Windermere's Fan is a four-act play written by Oscar Wilde. Like other plays by Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan is a play that satirizes British society.

The play was produced in 1892 and then published a year later at the insistence of Sir...

The Chrysalids is a science fiction novel written by John Wyndham. He wrote the book shortly after World War II. At that time, England was still recovering from the effects of WWII, while also managing the threat of the Cold War. Wyndham’s novel...

“Marriage” is unequivocally one of Moore’s most challenging and compelling works, often anthologized and studied. It came out just a year after the other High Modernist achievements of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Its...

“Reflections on Gandhi” was published in the Partisan Review in 1949, one year after Gandhi was assassinated and three years after Indian independence. Orwell takes up the question of the power of Gandhi’s non-violence as a method of political...

"The Bet" is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekov, written in 1889. It centers on a bet that is made one night between a banker and a young lawyer at a party of intellectuals. The banker, a successful millionaire and gambler bets the lawyer...

“A Grave” is one of Marianne Moore’s most well-known poems. It was initially called “Graveyard,” and was first published in The Dial in July of 1924; it was revised slightly for its appearance in 1924’s Observations. It was the first to be...

“The Paper Nautilus” is a short, personal, and evocative poem. It was written in 1940 for Moore’s friend and mentee Elizabeth Bishop after the younger poet gifted Moore an actual nautilus shell. It may have been the same nautilus shell Bishop’s...

“The Steeple-Jack” was first included in Moore's 1932 collection Poetry in 1932, where it was part of a triptych, which comprised “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play.” “The Steeple-Jack” formed the “novel” part of the triptych and was...

“Poetry” was published in 1921 as a lyric poem written in free verse. Moore tinkered with this poem a couple times and in her 1967 Complete Poems of Marianne Moore she reduced it to just three lines: “I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however,...