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Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work is concerned with the complexity of life: relationships, conflict, the body, sexuality, and food. Bass's poem "The Thing Is," published in her 2002 collection Mules of Love, instructs...

Blood Brothers is a musical written by English dramatist and composer Willy Russell. It depicts the lives of twin brothers, Mickey and Eddie, who were separated at birth. One ends up being raised by a rich family and becoming a local politician...

Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to be one of his early comedies performed for the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Perhaps more than any Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to be directed toward the specific...

The Lincoln Highway (2021) is a road-trip narrative set in 1954 America, spanning a timeline of ten days and 1,500 miles across the country. Packed into ten short days is the story of four boys’ journeys to find their respective futures, as Emmett...

Rupi Kaur is a Punjabi-Canadian writer and performer whose work centers on themes of womanhood, abuse, love, and loss. She self-published her first collection, milk and honey, in 2014, and just two years later it became a New York Times-...

The Faerie Queene was written over the course of about a decade by Edmund Spenser. He published the first three books in 1590, then the next four books (plus revisions to the first three) in 1596. It was originally intended to be twelve books...

"Elegy for My Father's Father," which appeared in James K. Baxter's 1966 poetry collection Pig Island Letters, is a poignant and reflective poem that explores the complex relationship between the poet and his paternal grandfather. The speaker...

Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey is a play about a working-class schoolgirl's dysfunctional relationship with her mother. First staged in 1958, the play is a pioneering work in the British cultural movement known as kitchen sink realism.

The...

Louis Sachar’s Small Steps is a young adult sequel to Holes, and it follows the storyline of Theodore “Armpit” Johnson after he returns home from Camp Green Lake Juvenile Detention and Correctional Facility. Small Steps was published on January...

Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World is thought to have been first published in 1666, and is considered one of the first examples of science fiction novels. The novel follows a young woman named Lady Margaret, who discovers a portal to an...

The Vivisector, published in 1970, is Patrick White's eighth and longest novel. White dedicated the novel to the painter Sidney Nolan but denied that the main character, Hurtle Duffield, was based on him. The novel is often considered a largely...

Dennis Kelly's DNA is a play about a group of teenagers conspiring to cover up the death of a peer who falls into a ventilation shaft while being bullied by the group. It was first performed in 2008 in London.

Comprising four long scenes and...

Sizwe Banzi is Dead is a play by South African playwright Athol Fugard, first performed in 1972. Set in the South African towns of New Brighton and Port Elizabeth, the play tells the story of two men named Styles and Sizwe.

The play begins with...

Judith Wright was an important Australian poet, critic, and environmentalist who entwined her artistry with her activism. "Train Journey," published in the 1953 collection The Gateway, is about the relationship between the speaker and the country...

Set in Tobago and first staged in 1978, Derek Walcott's play Pantomime is a two-act comedy about an English hotelier who proposes to his Trinidadian employee that they act together in a race-reversed satire of Robinson Crusoe.

Operating a rundown...

Judith Wright was an Australian poet and critic known for writing as well as her campaigns for peace, environmental conservation, and Aboriginal land rights. In "Woman to Man," published in the 1949 collection of the same name, a woman ponders the...

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1590 and 1594, thus placing it among the earliest of the Bard’s plays. Some scholars suggest that the play was likely the very first play Shakespeare wrote for the...

Judith Wright was a prominent Australian writer known for her poetry, criticism, and activism. Originally published in the 1966 collection The Other Half, "Eve to Her Daughters" presents the biblical Eve as a speaker addressing her daughters (the...

By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter was recognized as one of the most widely-performed and influential contemporary playwrights. Born to a Jewish family in the Hackney area of East London in 1930,...

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy involving two cousins who battle for their city and fall in love with one woman. The play is based on "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a long poem written in Middle...

Composed sometime between 1595 and 1603, the first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s tragicomedy All’s Well That Ends Well took place on November 8, 1623. That the next recorded performance did not occur until 1741 provides some...

“Poppies” is a poem written by Anglo-Italian poet Jane Weir. It appears in Exit Wounds, a collection commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy in 2009. Weir has described “Poppies” as “a contemporary war poem about war in its various guises.” The poem...

"Island Man" is a poem by esteemed Guyanese-British author Grace Nichols, who was recently awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. “Island Man” was published in her 1984 book The Fat Black Woman’s Poems.

The poem describes a man who awakes...

El Filibusterismo was the second novel written by Filipino writer and nationalist José Rizal. He published the book in 1891 as the sequel to his first novel, Noli Me Tangere or The Social Cancer. El Filibusterismo, known in English as The Reign of...