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A Dance of the Forests is one of Wole Soyinka's best-known plays and was commissioned as part of a larger celebration of Nigerian independence. It was a polarizing play that made many Nigerians angry at the time of its production, specifically...

"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1843 in an edition of the long-running periodical The Saturday Evening Post and subsequently included in The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1845). The short story is acclaimed for its probing of...

Neruda wrote “Ode to My Suit” (“Oda al Traje”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, socks, and a watch. The "Odes"—around two hundred and fifty in all—also paid tribute to particular people....

“The Book of Questions III” is one of seventy-four poems contained in Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions" (“El libro de las preguntas”). Thought of another way, “III” is four questions in a book of 316. Each poem, or question, can be read...

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is a Modernist poem written in free verse with occasional rhymes. The major conflict in the poem is between nature, represented by the moon, and culture, represented by the city. It explores themes of memory and fate.

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"Journey of the Magi" was the first poem that T.S. Eliot wrote after his baptism into the Anglican church on July 29, 1927. From that point on, almost everything he wrote propagated the Christian faith. This poem was first published in 1927 by his...

T.S. Eliot wrote "Preludes" between 1910 and 1911 while he was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then in Paris. The poem was included in Eliot's breakout 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Poems, but it was first published in the second...

Neruda wrote “Ode to My Socks” (“Oda a los calcetines”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, clothes, and a watch. The Odes, around two hundred and fifty in all, also paid tribute to...

T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1923, five years after World War I ended in 1918. At the time, Eliot lived as an American expatriate in London, England. His poetry of the 1920s responded to the aftermath of the war, especially its effect on...

The Night Circus is a novel by writer and multimedia artist Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011, it was the author's debut novel. She has acknowledged debts to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige...

The Shape of Water—released in 2017—is rare in Guillermo Del Toro's oeuvre as a film that's relatively optimistic. It's also the first film of Del Toro's to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which it did in 2018. The film also snagged awards...

The story of fireman Guy Montag first appeared in "The Fireman", a short story by Ray Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Montag's story was expanded two years later, in 1953, and was published as Fahrenheit 451. While the novel...

“Affliction I” is one of 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most memorable and loved poems. Herbert was a Welsh poet and priest. His single collection of poems, known as The Temple, was published in 1633 after his early death at the age of...

"The Flowers" is a short story written by Alice Walker, published in 1973 as part of the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. It is only two pages long—565 words total. "The Flowers" describes the carefree life of Myop, a...

“since feeling is first” was published in E. E. Cummings’s 1926 poetry collection is 5. Released at perhaps the height of the poet’s career, is 5 features poems that exemplify Cummings’s iconoclastic, experimental, witty, and often satirical...

"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean...

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...

Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair...

Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938 and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to...

The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964. The heroine of the novel is Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman who is endowed with a sharp mind and a proud, unyielding temper. Hagar is having difficulty coming to terms...

An aubade is a poem traditionally set at dawn or early morning, and typically about parting lovers. This “Aubade” doesn’t involve love, however, despite its fitting setting. In the poem, which uses an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, the speaker wakes up...

Call Me by Your Name is a 2017 coming-of-age romance film directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the book of the same name by André Aciman. It stars Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, two young men who find themselves...

"Cat Person" is a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2017, which quickly went viral, attaining significant praise on the internet, especially within certain feminist circles.

The story is told from the point of view of Margot, a...

Among the Hidden is a young adult novel published in 1998. The book depicts a dystopian society in the not-too-distant future in which it is illegal for families to have more than two children. Illegal third children, like Luke Gardner, must spend...