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12 Angry Men is a film from 1957, directed by Sidney Lumet, with a screenplay by Reginald Rose, adapted from his teleplay. It looks at a jury of 12 men as they decide the fate of an 18-year-old defendant who is on trial for the murder of his...

First published in 1944, Eleanor Estes's classic children's book The Hundred Dresses is about the remorse a young girl experiences after she stands by while her best friend teases an impoverished classmate who claims to own one hundred dresses.

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Coraline is the first children's novella by British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. The novel takes its name from the story's young, female protagonist. After moving to a new home, Coraline acquaints herself with her eccentric neighbors and explores...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Most likely written in 1579, but not published until 1595, Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy is a new response to an old charge against the legitimacy of poetry, one that had been leveled against the literary arts at least since Plato in The...

No Sugar is a play written by Jack Davis, published in 1986. It takes place during the Great Depression in Western Australia and follows an Aboriginal family, the Millimuras, as they navigate life on corrupt reservations and contend with the...

First published in the Japanese literary publication Shinchō in January 1922, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove" (or "In a Bamboo Grove") is about a young samurai killed in mysterious circumstances. Pieced together from contradictory...

"In Those Years" is the second poem in Adrienne Rich's Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995). Written after the end of the Reagan presidency, this poem appears in a section of the book entitled "What Kind of Times Are These." It thus...

Invictus is a film from 2009 directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Anthony Peckham about the improvement of the South African Springboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup, which took place during the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Mandela had a...

David Malouf's Ransom (2009) is a profound novel of immense suffering, sorrow, and redemption.

It retells the story of Homer's Iliad from books 22 to 24. While the Iliad covers the entirety of the last year of the Trojan War, a famous conflict in...

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that was first published in 1946. Kazantzakis is a Cretan author who is considered one of the most influential modern Greek writers in history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in...