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The story of King Lear and his three daughters existed in some form up to four centuries before Shakespeare recorded his vision. Lear was a British King who reigned before the birth of Christ, allowing Shakespeare to place his play in a Pagan...

“The Windhover” is a sonnet written in 1887 and the best-known work of the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though unpublished in the author’s lifetime, it is now widely considered one of the crowning achievements of Victorian...

John Milton was an English poet and political thinker. Best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, a retelling of the story of creation and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, he was also a political revolutionary. His life spanned an...

"The Leash" by Ada Limón is a free-verse poem discussing how to resist despair, through the scene of the speaker walking her dog. The poem consists of one long stanza of thirty-three lines, with no consistent form of rhyme or meter. Limón blends...

A Mercy is Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, published in 2008. It is set in the late 17th century in colonial Virginia and explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in a lawless, raw new world.

When...

"Instructions on Not Giving Up" is a fourteen-line unrhymed poem about spring and resilience by 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Limón wrote the poem in one rush of inspiration, immediately after walking her dog through streets littered with...

For centuries, Titus Andronicus has carried the reputation of being the worst play by the best playwright. Though it was a great success when first staged in the late sixteenth century, in 1687 an English producer, Edward Ravenscroft, declared ...

Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V., first published in 1963, introduces many of the recurring themes—from historical relativism to technological menace to recurring characters like Pig Bodine and Lieutenant Weissman—that will appear throughout...

Geoffrey Chaucer is the English Middle Ages’ most famous writer. Best known for The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories in a variety of voices, he was also the author of several other well-known long works, multiple translations, numerous...

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's most famous tragedy and one of the world's most enduring love stories, derives its plot from several sixteenth century sources. Shakespeare's primary inspiration for the play was Arthur Brooke's Tragical History of...

10 Things I Hate About You is a 1999 American teen romantic comedy film. It was directed by Gil Junger and produced by Andrew Lazar and Jeffrey Chernov of Mad Chance Productions and Touchstone Pictures, respectively. It was released on March 31,...

“Pied Beauty” was written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877, but—like so much of his work—wasn’t published until 1918, 30 years after his death, as a part of the collection Poems, which was edited by his close friend Robert...

John Clare was born in 1793, in the English village of Helpstone to Parker and Ann Stimson Clare. His father was a field laborer, and both of his parents were essentially illiterate. Clare received some schooling and learned basic reading and...

“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a poem about love by the English Romantic poet John Clare, written while he was an unwilling resident of Northampton Insane Asylum. Like all of Clare’s later work, it was never published during his lifetime, but...

Children of Blood and Bone is a Young Adult fantasy novel by Nigerian-American novelist Tomi Adeyemi. Children of Blood and Bone is the first book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy. It is followed by Children of Virtue and Vengeance. The final...

The only authoritative edition of Julius Caesar is the 1623 First Folio, which appears to have used the theater company's official promptbook rather than Shakespeare's manuscript. Some anomalies exist, most notably in Act Four where there is...

“The Yellowhammer’s Nest” is one of the best-known poems by the English Romantic poet John Clare. It was written in the mid-1820s and published in Clare’s final collection, The Rural Muse (1835), as part of a series of poems about bird’s nests....

Daniel Woodrell's Winter’s Bone is a 2006 mystery-crime novel about Ree Dolly, a sixteen-year-old girl whose family home will be seized unless she can find her missing father and make him appear in court. Determined to secure a place to live for...

Malgudi Days is a short-story collection by Indian writer R. K. Narayan. The book was initially published in 1943 in India by Indian Thought Publications. It was republished internationally by Penguin Classics in 1982.

The book follows the lives...

In “Autumn,” the English Romantic poet John Clare describes how the land changes as summer gives way to fall. The poem employs a string of similes to compare the autumnal landscape to the things of domestic country life. However, at the end of the...

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was published in 2017. It is Jenkins Reid's 5th novel, but her first work of historical fiction; her first 4 novels are generally considered to be part of the romance novel genre. The Seven...

Legend says that Macbeth was written in 1605 or 1606 and performed at Hampton Court in 1606 for King James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark. Whether it was first performed at the royal court or was premiered at the Globe...

Released in 2001, O is a film directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, and Elden Henson, the play had a budget of $5 million and raked in nearly $20 million at the box office. The rights to the film were...

The plot of Shakespeare's Othello is largely taken from Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, a tale of love, jealousy, and betrayal; however, the characters, themes, and attitudes of the two works are vastly different, with Shakespeare's play being...