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"homage to my hips" is a work by the twentieth-century American poet Lucille Clifton. Originally published in her 1980 collection Two-Headed Woman, the poem uses the symbol of its speaker's hips to explore the experience of Black womanhood. The...

Dead Souls is a novel by celebrated Russian author Nikolai Gogol. First published in 1842, it details the quest of a bureaucrat named Chichikov to purchase the names of deceased serfs in a scheming effort to acquire land and wealth. Gogol claimed...

Harold Pinter's The Room is a tragicomic play about an anxious woman whose humble life is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious messenger whose presence portends death. Written in 1957, The Room was Pinter's first play.

Living in a single-room...

"First Death in Nova Scotia" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. First appearing in The New Yorker in 1962, and then in the 1965 collection Questions of Travel, this work explores themes of death...

Warriors Don't Cry is a nonfiction memoir published by Melba Pattillo Beals in 1994. The book is set in the 1950s and 1960s, using entries from Beals' diary to recount her experiences as part of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine African...

Although Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps better known for his Gothic short stories (such as "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Fall of the House of Usher") than for his poetry, a number of his poetic works have gained popularity in the popular...

Set in 1937 and starring Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski's neo-noir film Chinatown (1974) is about a private investigator who uncovers a conspiracy involving corrupt management of the Los Angeles water supply. The film was inspired by a series of...

The Jew of Malta was composed around 1590, shortly after the death of the Duke of Guise in 1588, to which the prologue alludes. Its first recorded performance took place on February 26, 1592, by the Lord Strange's Men. Another followed on March 10...

Claude McKay published his poem “The White House” in 1922. It appeared alongside three other poems in a collection titled “Spring Sonnets,” published in The Liberator, an American communist magazine. The poem utilizes the sonnet form which,...

"Beach Burial" is a poem by Kenneth Slessor that details a scene from a World War II battle in Egypt that Slessor witnessed in 1942. Slessor worked as a war correspondent during World War II, which offered him an opportunity to see the world...

Shame is a novel written by author Salman Rushdie, first published in 1983. Set in the fictional town of Q. in the imaginary country "Peccavistan"—based on Quetta, in Pakistan—the book follows the intersection of various lives during a turbulent...

"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to...

Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in six monthly installments in 1996. It tells the story of a death-row supervisor named Paul Edgecombe, who one day encounters a prisoner with extraordinary powers named John Coffey....

Stay True was published in September of 2022. In addition to describing Hsu's maturation as a young Asian American man, the memoir is centered on the death of Hsu's friend Ken, who was killed while they were both students at Berkeley. In tender...

"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the...

The Vendor of Sweets is a novel by critically acclaimed Indian author R.K. Narayan. Set in India during the 1960s, It follows the life of a vendor of sweetmeats named Jagan as he tries to navigate a difficult relationship with his son Mali.

Set in...

Where the Crawdads Sing, published in 2018, tells the story of a 1950s North Carolina town that accuses the mysterious "Marsh Girl," Kya Clark, of a local celebrity's murder. According to author Delia Owens, the text explores " how isolation...

Marlowe lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

Published in 1989, Sexing the Cherry is Jeanette Winterson's third novel. It was preceded by Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and The Passion (1987). Sexing the Cherry incorporates elements of historical fiction, which is an element shared by...

Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, first published in 1996, is a satirical novel about a single woman in her thirties who hopes to lose weight, improve her career, eliminate her vices, gain self-control, and find love. Her ambitions are...

Neuromancer, written by William Gibson and published in 1984, is a science fiction novel best known for being one of the first examples of the "cyberpunk" genre. Upon publication, Neuromancer received critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award,...

The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by critically celebrated British writer W. Somerset Maugham. The novel follows the life of Charles Strickland, a businessman who devotes the remainder of his life to painting in an effort to become a great artist....

"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, first published in 1897 before appearing in Yeats's 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. The poem describes Aengus—an Irish god of youth, poetry, and love—entering the...

The title page of the 1615 edition of Kyd's celebrated play reads:

The Spanish Tragedie:or, Hieronimo is mad againe.

In its day, The Spanish Tragedy was anonymous. Only in 1773 did the theatrical historian Thomas Hawkins discover, in Thomas...