David Almond’s Skellig was published in 1998 and is considered one of the most significant works of children’s literature in the late 20th century.

Almond had already written short stories when what would be Skellig came to him. He told an...

"The House" is a poem by Warsan Shire. It was published in 2011 in Shire's first poetry collection, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It focuses on womanhood, comparing a woman's body to a house equipped with different rooms that serve...

"The Birth-Mark" is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most revered and gripping short stories. Published in the March 1843 edition of The Pioneer, the story examines human sin, evokes the perils of overweening ambition, and theorizes about gender...

The Big Lebowski is a stoner comedy and crime film from 1998 produced and directed by the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan). It follows Jeffrey "the Dude" Lebowski, an unemployed bowler and general slacker as he navigates a convoluted instance of...

“All in green went my love riding,” one of E. E. Cummings’s most celebrated poems, was published in 1923 in Tulips and Chimneys, Cummings' first published collection of poems. Written in the early years of Cummings’s career, it is perhaps one of...

"Anne Hathaway" appears in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems The World’s Wife, published in 1999. This collection moved women in well-known stories and myths to the foregrounds of their stories—spaces previously occupied by men. "Anne...

Published in 1958, The Guide is a novel by Indian author R.K. Narayan set in his fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. It follows the life of an Indian man, Raju, as he evolves throughout his life to become one of the most prominent holy men in...

Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox on commission from the Festival of Two Worlds at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1959. Its first production took place in New York the following year. The Sandbox is linked to a longer play by Albee titled The...

A House for Mr. Biswas was V. S. Naipaul’s fourth novel, following three earlier efforts that were essentially all comedies of manners set in the author’s homeland of Trinidad. This predominantly comic novel, which made Naipaul a major figure in...

Susan Glaspell’s "A Jury of Her Peers" is the short-story version of her play Trifles, which was staged a year before she published "Jury." Essentially the exact same story in two different literary forms, both tell a fictionalized but accurate...

Y Tu Mamá También is a 2001 Mexican drama directed by Academy Award–winning director Alfonso Cuaron. The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) at the time of its release. Written by...

Monkey Beach is Canadian author Eden Robinson's debut novel. It was published in 2000 by Vintage Canada and tells the story of a girl named Lisamarie Hall who possesses supernatural abilities.

The plot of Monkey Beach unfolds through the eyes of...

Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and one of the most influential thinkers of the 1900s, spent much of his life devoting himself to psychoanalysis, a technique used to treat psychopathology through dialogue. He devoted himself to studying the...

Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption is an adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. It follows the story of Andy Dufresne, a man who is serving two...

As Francis Ford Coppola recounted in an interview with Playboy, he used to joke that he would only make a sequel to The Godfather if it were going to be Abbot and Costello Meet the Godfather. For a long time, he found the idea of creating a sequel...

Billy Elliot is a 2000 film directed by Stephen Daldry, written by Lee Hall. It was produced by BBC Films and distributed by Universal Pictures. The film grossed $109,80,263 worldwide and was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original...

War Horse is a children's novel set in Wartime Europe; the narrative concerns events from before the declaration of World War I to shortly after the Germans surrendered to the Allies. The narrator of the novel is a horse called Joey, a cavalry...

"Lethe" can be found in H.D.'s 1924 collection Heliodora, which contains many other poems that allude to Greek mythology. Lethe is a fixture in Greek mythology—a river in Hades that causes those who drink the water to forget their past. Lethe was...