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It is hard to overstate the impact of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. It is a canonical text not only in French literature and modernism, but in the history of European art. It influenced innumerable poets, novelists, artists, and critics in...

Written and published in 1777, the play The School for Scandal is considered by many to be the greatest comedy of manners.

Written by the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the play became successful almost immediately and is a perfect...

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a children’s book written in 1968 by famed author Roald Dahl. Its main characters are a number of personified animals, including the Mr. Fox of the title. The story follows his adventures as he tries to outwit the farmer who...

“The Overcoat”, published in 1842, is a short story by Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russian writer of plays, short stories and novels. Though Gogol is sometimes described as a realist writer, “The Overcoat” contains surreal, exaggerated and...

Fittingly, George Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language” is accurately described by its title. The essay is about the connection between politics and poor uses of language. It presents an argument for clear, simple, unpretentious...

Fantomina is a novel written by Eliza Haywood in 1725. The book mainly revolves around an unnamed character who becomes intrigued by the men she sees in a playhouse in London. She then pretends to be a prostitute and enjoys talking to a man called...

Written and published in 1587, the play Tamburlaine the Great was well received by English society. Part I was originally a single play; Christopher Marlowe wrote Part II a year later due to the initial play’s popularity.

Along with his...

Lady Windermere's Fan is a four-act play written by Oscar Wilde. Like other plays by Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan is a play that satirizes British society.

The play was produced in 1892 and then published a year later at the insistence of Sir...

The Chrysalids is a science fiction novel written by John Wyndham. He wrote the book shortly after World War II. At that time, England was still recovering from the effects of WWII, while also managing the threat of the Cold War. Wyndham’s novel...

“Marriage” is unequivocally one of Moore’s most challenging and compelling works, often anthologized and studied. It came out just a year after the other High Modernist achievements of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Its...

“Reflections on Gandhi” was published in the Partisan Review in 1949, one year after Gandhi was assassinated and three years after Indian independence. Orwell takes up the question of the power of Gandhi’s non-violence as a method of political...

"The Bet" is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekov, written in 1889. It centers on a bet that is made one night between a banker and a young lawyer at a party of intellectuals. The banker, a successful millionaire and gambler bets the lawyer...

“A Grave” is one of Marianne Moore’s most well-known poems. It was initially called “Graveyard,” and was first published in The Dial in July of 1924; it was revised slightly for its appearance in 1924’s Observations. It was the first to be...

“The Paper Nautilus” is a short, personal, and evocative poem. It was written in 1940 for Moore’s friend and mentee Elizabeth Bishop after the younger poet gifted Moore an actual nautilus shell. It may have been the same nautilus shell Bishop’s...

“The Steeple-Jack” was first included in Moore's 1932 collection Poetry in 1932, where it was part of a triptych, which comprised “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play.” “The Steeple-Jack” formed the “novel” part of the triptych and was...

“Poetry” was published in 1921 as a lyric poem written in free verse. Moore tinkered with this poem a couple times and in her 1967 Complete Poems of Marianne Moore she reduced it to just three lines: “I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however,...

Reflecting on the genesis of La La Land, writer and director Damien Chazelle said, "I guess you write what you know...There is something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don’t come true—that to me is what’s...

"The Drover's Wife" is one of Lawson's most famous short stories. Set in the Australian bush, it is the tale of a woman facing off against a snake in order to protect herself and her children. The character's stoicism and quiet heroism, as well as...

The Storyteller is one of the best-known short stories written by Saki, the pen name of author H. H. Munro. It was first published in 1897; as was customary at the time, it was published in newspapers before its publication in a collection of...

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most famous, beloved, and lauded works of American letters; it is also the first autobiography to achieve widespread popularity and is a classic of the genre. It sheds light on the life of one...

Written, directed, and produced by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining was released by Warner Brothers in 1980 and based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. It was the twelfth feature film by Kubrick and was met with colossal critical success....

Jodi Picoult is an American author who writes novels targeted at both adolescents and adults, choosing themes and language that will allow a wide audience to connect with the story. The Pact, Picoult's fifth book, does exactly this. The plot...

Paul Fisher, the protagonist of Tangerine, has bad eyes, but this doesn’t mean he’s blind. In fact Paul sees through most things in his upper middle class community—a sterile housing development in Tangerine County, Florida, called Lake Windsor...

The Sign of the Four is a novel starring the characters Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in 1889 after Joseph M Stoddart, the managing editor of Lippincott’s Monthly, commissioned the story. Lippincott’s was an...