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Vertigo is one of Alfred Hitchcock's best-known films, a 1958 psychological thriller based on the 1954 novel by the French writing team Boileau-Narcejac, D'entre les morts. It was shot in San Francisco and employs several different camera...

The winner of second prize in the prestigious O. Henry Awards for the year 1941 was a short story written by a relative newcomer to the world of American fiction, a woman straight out of William Faulkner’s backyard. That woman was Eudora Welty and...

“After great pain…” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous and widely read poems, and one that has inspired a good deal of critical commentary and controversy. Because of Dickinson's notoriously private and reclusive nature, the poem’s apparent...

First published in the April 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, O. Henry's “A Retrieved Reformation” is about a notorious safecracker named Jimmy Valentine who gives up his life of crime after he falls in love with a banker's daughter.

O. Henry...

At Makerere University College in 1960, while being in his second preliminary year, Ngugi wa Thiong'o approached Jonathan Kariara, who was in his final year as a student of English and involved in a university journal called Penpoint. Ngugi wa...

Adapted from the critically-acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men (released in 2007), tells the story of a man named Llewyn Moss, who one day stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and nearly $2,000,000 in cash....

Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) is an ambitious, profound novel with an urgent environmental message. Spanning multiple time periods and including numerous narrators, it tells the story of a group of activists who are called to protect the...

“Incident” is one of the most famous poems from Countee Cullen’s first and most famous poetry collections: Color (1925). Cullen was a rather traditional poet. His main influence was the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet John Keats. He was...

The Pianist is a 2002 film by Roman Polanski based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival during the German occupation of Warsaw in 1942. It was directed by Roman Polanski and written by Ronald Harwood, and it met with widespread...

Hamilton is an acclaimed musical that follows the life and exploits of an oft-overlooked Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton. Using innovative musical and theatrical methods, the musical takes the audience through the biography of the impassioned...

First published in 1938, set amid the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, "The Lamp at Noon" is a short story about how a young homesteader couple's competing visions of a better life lead to the death of their son.

The desolate, dust-filled...

Written in 1974 during the politically-charged second-wave feminist movement, which began in the 1960s as a movement to increase women’s equality, Adrienne Rich's poem “Power” was clearly a political statement. Rich was heavily involved in the...

Cal is a 1983 novel by the Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty. It is a story situated during one of the most difficult periods in Irish history, the time known as "the Troubles," when Northern Ireland was divided between Loyalist and...

Although the majority of the plot takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, Kate Atkinson's third novel to feature retired police detective Jackson Brodie actually begins in Devon, in the south east of England, where a six year old girl, Joanna,...

Water by the Spoonful is a play written by playwright, poet and essayist Quiara Alegría Hudes. Hudes also wrote a book for the musical In the Heights. The play premiered on October 20, 2011 at Hartford Stage in Connecticut. It is played in English...

Released in September 2019, Red at the Bone tells the story of a young woman named Melody, a sixteen year old who is celebrating her birthday in her grandparents house in Brooklyn, New York. Although it tells the story of Melody's family history,...

Castle Rackrent is unusual among Maria Rackrent's works in that it is one of the few novels she wrote that was not edited by her father. Published in 1800, it is a short novel / novella that tells the story of four heirs to the Rackrent fortune as...

Elizabeth Strout first wrote about her protagonist, Olive Kitteridge, in her 2008 novel bearing her heroine's name; this sequel follows a similar format, and consist of thirteen short stories set on the coast of Maine, that do not follow on from...

Directly translated from its original language, the title of text is literally one with the skin of a tiger; this Medieval epic poem was penned by Georgia's national poet Shota Rustaveli in the twelfth century. It is divided into Rustavelian...

The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle among perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his...

C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, is considered by many to be one of history's greatest apologists (logical defenders of the Christian faith). Out of many nonfiction works, The Problem of Pain stands out as one of...

Although he died destitute, Philip K. Dick is responsible for some of the most inventive -- and iconic -- science fiction stories of all time. Among such stories include Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle, Minority Report, and A Scanner...

Jasper Jones tells the story of Charlie Bucktin, a thirteen-year-old boy living in Western Australia during the Vietnam War. He befriends the town outcast, Jasper, but soon finds himself in a dire situation that tests his morality. Charlie helps...

"Miss Brill" is a short story written and published in 1920 by Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand writer. The story was published towards the end of the writer’s life while she was living in London. Mansfield's own life was characterized by...