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American Psycho is Bret Easton Ellis's third novel, released in 1991. The first-person narrator is a Wall Street investment banker named Patrick Bateman, who either is or imagines himself to be a prolific serial killer. Like other works which...

During the press tour for Jojo Rabbit, writer/producer/director/actor Taika Waititi described the film as an “anti-hate” satire. An irreverent and farcical Nazi comedy about a Hitler Youth member who falls in love with a Jewish girl, Jojo Rabbit...

Before there was Count Dracula, there was Carmilla. Indeed, it was Sheridan Le Fanu who introduced the vampire into the English literature tradition. Carmilla was first presented to the world in serial form, published in four editions of a...

The Dutch House is a novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2019. It tells the story of two siblings, Danny and Maeve Conroy, and how their abandonment as children leaves them reliant on each other.

The fictional Dutch House of the title is located...

Lysistrata, a comedy by Athens' greatest comedic writer, Aristophanes, debuted in Athens in the year 411 BCE, around the time when the Peloponnesian War was just beginning. The play itself centers on the beginnings of this war and the efforts of a...

Set in a dystopian near-future Britain, Alan Moore's 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta follows an anarchist revolutionary named V as he seeks vengeance against the former administrators of a concentration camp and topples the country's...

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The book consists of twelve stories that focus on the lives of Nigerians living in both Africa and in the United States. Many of the stories in the...

First performed on the London stage in 1905, Man and Superman is an extraordinary play precisely because it inverts so many of the traditional or expected roles of theater. On its surface, this play, by George Bernard Shaw, is a standard romantic...

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in American schools to be unlawful. Five years later, Tennessee Williams published Sweet Bird of Youth against a backdrop of political change; segregationist Jim Crow laws were...

Set in a World War I dugout from March 18 to March 21, 1918, R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play Journey's End follows Captain Stanhope as he deals with alcoholism and symptoms of PTSD while commanding a group of British army officers in the lead up to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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,...

"Jenny" is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is, for the most part, a dramatic monologue about a prostitute. For most of the poem, the speaker, a wealthy, unmarried man, spends the night watching Jenny sleep. The subject matter in "Jenny" is...

Parasite is a 2019 South Korean film directed by Bong Joon-ho. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, unanimously. The screenplay was written by Bong Joon-ho in collaboration with Han Jin-won, and the film stars...