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The Manuscript: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exists in only one original manuscript, as the last of four poems in the MS. Cotton Nero A x. dating no later than 1400. The three poems preceding it are Pearl, Purity, and Patience, and all four are...

Maleficent (2014) is a dark, live-action retelling of Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of Maleficent, the original film's antagonist. The film explores Maleficent's backstory, emphasizing her sympathetic...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work examines the inextricable link between humans and nature. Originally published in Sheers's 2006 poetry collection Skirrid Hill, "Mametz Wood" is a poem that reckons with events from the past; specifically,...

"I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to" is a short poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Published posthumously, it was written during the early 1860s. Like much of Dickinson's work, it is brief and deceptively simple in form and...

Alan Gratz's Refugee is a young-adult novel about three young refugees from different eras: Josef Landau, a German Jew displaced from Nazi Germany; Isabel Fernandez, a Cuban fleeing her starving country in 1994; and Mahmoud Bishara, a Syrian...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work uses nature to symbolize human affairs, emotions, and relationships. First published in Sheers's 2006 collection Skirrid Hill, “Winter Swans” is a poem about a couple experiencing issues in their...

Marc Olden's Black Samurai (1974) is a crime thriller novel about Robert Sand, an American GI who is trained by a Japanese samurai master to become the world's strongest fighter. Working alongside a former US president, Sand uses his martial arts...

Life of Pi began with some casual reading. Yann Martel was perusing through John Updike’s rather negative review of Max and the Cats, a story about a Jewish family who run a zoo in Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. They decide...

The Duchess of Malfi is generally considered to be John Webster’s greatest work. He probably wrote it in either 1613 or 1614, and it was first staged before the end of 1614. The play was first performed by the prestigious King’s Men acting troupe...

The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson's four great comedies. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred in Oxford in 1610. It was also entered into the Stationers' Register in this year, though it might have been written and performed...

New Atlantis is an incomplete novel written by scientist and scholar Francis Bacon. Left unfinished, it was published posthumously in 1626 within a much longer text on natural history, Sylva Sylvarum. The official title is New Atlantis: A Worke...

Too Bright to See is a young-adult novel by Kyle Lukoff. It follows Bug, a young person, who begins to experience a series of supernatural events following the death of an uncle. Over the course of the book, Bug comes to a meaningful understanding...

Reef is Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel, published in 1994. It was nominated for the 1994 Man Booker Prize, and won the 1997 Premio Mondello Five Continents Asia Prize, the 1994 Yorkshire Post First Work Prize, the 1994 New Voice Award, and was...

Katherine Center's Happiness for Beginners (2015) is a novel about Helen Carpenter, a divorced schoolteacher who hopes that a three-week wilderness survival course will leave her feeling confident and renewed. The unexpected presence of her...

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. It was first printed in the First Folio in 1623, and the earliest known performance is recorded to have been at Gray's Inn, one of London's law schools, on December 28th, 1594. However,...

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a short story collection by Ethiopian writer Meron Hadero, first published in 2022. The stories in the collection detail various lives of African immigrants in America.

The stories tackle different...

Alan Garner's Treacle Walker, published in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is a brief but poetic novel that explores themes of time, reality, and perception. The novel builds on much of Garner's previous work, which similarly...

Richard II was first printed in 1597 in a good quality text most likely taken from Shakespeare's manuscript. Two reprints in 1598 mention Shakespeare as the author. Later prints in 1608 and 1615 appear to be taken from the earlier versions, but...

As part of his 1605 commission to produce an entertainment for the Twelfth Night celebration, Ben Jonson, working in close collaboration with noted architect Inigo Jones as the scenic designer, produced the Masque of Blackness. King James I...

Much Ado About Nothing was first published in 1600 and was likely written in 1598. The 1600 printing was the only copy published during Shakespeare's lifetime, and bears the title inscription describing that the play "hath been sundrie times...

Bartholomew Fair was first performed on October 31, 1614 by the company Lady Elizabeth's Men. It is a Jacobean comedy and is generally considered one of Jonson's four famous comedies – among The Alchemist, Epicoene, and Volpone. Of these plays, ...

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a novel by Angie Cruz, first published in 2022. Set in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights, it tells the story of a middle-aged Dominican woman named Cara Romero.

The novel follows Cara...

The first performance of Measure for Measure is believed to have taken place in 1604, during the reign of King James I. By this time, Shakespeare is believed to have begun writing his plays for performance at the Blackfriars theatre, a small,...

As You Like It was likely written between 1598 and 1600. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600 but no edition followed the entry, thereby leading to the ambiguity in its publication date. Two topical references have been...