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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...

A native-born Lithuanian, Milosz grew up in Czarist Russia. His parents brought him up a humble servant of the Catholic Church, a relationship which he struggled with his entire life but to which he remained true. Returning to his homeland which...

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...

Queen Elizabeth I was the third longest ruler of the England, reigning for 45 years. Over the course of nearly half a century of as supreme ruler of the powerful monarchy in the world, Queen Elizabeth had produced enough letters and speeches to...

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...

In December 2013, the Guardian ran a review by Julian Barnes on his favorite novel of the year with the headline "Stoner: The Must-Read Novel of 2013." What was most interesting about this assertion is that the book which Barnes was reviewing was...

The Sniper is a short story written by the Irish novelist and short story writer Liam O'Flaherty. It was published in January 1923, in the middle of the Irish Civil war, which took place between 1922 to 1923. The story The Sniper too is centered...

Charlotte Bronte was a top-tier poet of nineteenth century England (the Victorian era). She was born during 1816 and died during 1855. Despite how talented she was, only two of her poems are widely cherished today, according to the Poetry...

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,...

Reflecting on the genesis of La La Land, writer and director Damien Chazelle said, "I guess you write what you know...There is something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don’t come true—that to me is what’s...

The Mirror Maker was published in 1989 and is the translated English version of a select number of Primo Levi's previously published stories and essays. Levi would submit a new piece of literature to the centrist Italian newspaper La Stampa on a...

Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian stuck in Chicago in the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992, often portrays his main characters as Bosnian writers who try to adapt to a culture drastically different from one they were accustomed to. Hemon is most famous for his...

"The Drover's Wife" is one of Lawson's most famous short stories. Set in the Australian bush, it is the tale of a woman facing off against a snake in order to protect herself and her children. The character's stoicism and quiet heroism, as well as...