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The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is a play in two acts by Canadian playwright George Ryga. It is a play of significant cultural and social importance, which has been used by Indigenous activists as a means of forcing dominant structures to face the reality...

First-time director Sarah Daggar-Nickson's 2018 film A Vigilante is the story of Sadie, an abused wife-turned-vigilante who manages to escape from her violent husband and begins to study martial arts, survival skills and boxing so that she can...

Madame Butterfly is a three-act opera by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini based on the short story of the same name penned in 1898 by John Luther Long. The short story was inspired by stories that Long's sister, Jennie Correll, told him about an...

Written by American author Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (published in 2007) tells the story of a rather gifted young man named Kvothe, who aims to become the most notorious wizard in the entire world. Rothfuss' novel follows Kvothe from...

Edward II, first performed probably between 1587-1592 and published in 1594, is one of Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe’s most famous works. Based off of the history of King Edward II, the play depicts the king’s homosexuality and love...

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Paul Limbert Allman was a prodigious writer, writing nearly a half dozen books and countless essays and plays. Among his most famous essays is "The Frequency," which was published by the prestigious Harper's...

"The Good Daughter" is an autobiographical essay by American author Caroline Hwang. The essay gives the details of Hwang's internal struggle of being both a Korean and an American, and having parents that follow a strict Korean culture in a...

When you are the author of one of the most successful children's fiction series of all time, deciding how to follow up on your success can be quite a dilemma. Fortunately, J.K. Rowling decided to commit to a number of "firsts" when she tackled the...

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” was published for the first time in the July 18, 1964 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Cheever originally conceived of it as a novel before paring it down from 150 pages to 12. In 1968, the story was...

Uglies is a young-adult science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity dystopia sometime in the future. It is the first in the Uglies trilogy.

Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old on the verge of undergoing a mandatory cosmetic surgery...

"A New England Nun" is a short story published in 1891 by American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The short story was published in one of Freeman's most acclaimed books, A New England Nun and Other Stories. The story is set in a rural New...

River Thieves is a novel by Canadian author and poet Michael Crummey, originally published in 2001. The novel follows the story of the Peyton family, who have newly arrived in the New World, in the early 1800's. They set up shop in Newfoundland,...

Fifty Shades of Grey is the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which recounts the story of Anastasia Steele, a college student who begins a BDSM relationship with the wealthy Christian Grey. Originally, Fifty Shades of Grey and the...

Decades after the original Blade Runner, director Denis Villeneuve brought back the popular franchise with the release of Blade Runner 2049, in 2017. This film is set thirty years after the original and serves as a sequel to the landmark film....

Almost always listed among the greatest poems to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and very often singled out as the ultimate achievement of that cultural efflorescence, Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” was originally published in Survey Magazine on...

Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades" is a short story about Hermann, a calculating officer in the Army Engineers whose extreme greed leads him to obsess over finding out an old countess's magic formula to winning at the gambling game faro....

The Sand Child was written by Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and was published in 1985 in France. The novel discusses the impact of colonialism on Morroco, and also themes of gender, identity, and tradition. This story is continued in Jelloun’s...

Premiering in 1784, The Marriage of Figaro is the second play in a trilogy of plays about the character "Figaro" written by the notable French playwright and polymath Pierre Beaumarchais. A continuation of the story The Barber of Seville, the play...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti first published “The Woodspurge” in its final stage under the section “Songs” in his 1870 collection The House of Life. With the publication of 1881’s Poems: A New Edition, “The Woodspurge” was removed from its previous...

A children's book written by New York Times bestseller Vashti Harrison, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History tells the stories of 40 black women throughout history and how they contributed to history. These stories, obviously, are told in a...

A Vindication of the Rights of Men is a political pamphlet written by Mary Wollstonecraft. It was published in 1790 and was written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. In this text, Wollstonecraft criticizes...

Apeirogon is a novel published in 2020 by Irish-American author Colum McCann and is based on a real-life story. The book focuses on the unexpected friendship of two fathers, Palestinian Bassam Aramin and Israeli Rami Elhanan, who connect over the...

In his bestselling nonfiction narrative The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown vividly retells the 1936 University of Washington crew team’s journey to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The rowers won gold against all expectations,...

Weather was published in 2020 by American writer Jenny Offill and is her third published book. The novel follows librarian Lizzie Benson as she copes with a chaotic and turbulent American life. From no longer loving her husband to having to deal...