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The Giver combines themes of young adult fiction, such as that of the protagonist Jonas's coming of age, with themes taken from dystopian novels such as George Orwell's 1984 or in particular Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which deals with a...

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, is one of the author's most widely read novels, largely due to its ubiquitous presence in the high school curriculum. As a result, this mythic story of two opposites - the clever, wiry George...

“Shooting an Elephant” is a narrative essay by George Orwell about a conflicted period of Orwell’s life while he works as a police officer for the British Empire in colonial Burma. He despises the British Empire, and its presence in Burma, as do...

Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis in 1912, the year he felt his creativity finally taking a definite form. It was one of fairly few works Kafka was to publish in his lifetime. In 1913 he turned down an offer to publish the story, possibly because he...

"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a poem by W.B. Yeats, written in 1918 and published the following year. The sixteen-line, iambic tetrameter elegy is written from the perspective of a fighter pilot in World War I. This speaker is Irish, and...

Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio is an 1883 Italian children's novel about an enchanted wooden puppet whose mischievous and lazy nature lands him in many punishing situations. Throughout the novel, the narrator and characters repeat...

According to scholar Robert Elsie, a common feature across Kadaré's work is the depiction of "a remote and haunted Albania as seen through the eyes of the innocent or incomprehending foreigner" (585). Broken April, Kadaré's twelfth novel, is no...

Gwen Harwood's poem “Suburban Sonnet” was first published in 1961 in The Bulletin, a prominent Australian literary magazine. It appeared alongside two related poems, “Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day” and “In the Park,” all three of which expose the...

Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) is a play written by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. He composed the play in a two-week period in late July and early August of 1888. Strindberg deemed it a “modern psychological drama” and a “tragedy,” and when...

"Elvis's Twin Sister" first appeared in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 poetry collection The World's Wife. The collection explores themes of gender, femininity, and sexism through poems written from the perspective of real and imagined women with...

A Christmas Story (1983) is a bonafide American classic and a Christmas-time staple. Bob Clark's film tells the story of Ralphie, a young kid who tries to convince everyone possible – parents, teacher, and Santa – that the Red Ryder BB gun is the...

"Pilate's Wife" was originally published in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife. This book consists of poems written from the perspective of various overlooked women in history and myth. In the case of this poem, Duffy adopts the...

Inception is a 2010 action-thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Nolan developed the film over a 10-year period, initially pitching the script to Warner Bros. in 2001 as a horror vehicle. The studio passed and...

David Chariandy's Brother is a 2017 coming-of-age novel about Michael, a child of Trinidadian immigrants who struggles to come to terms with the police killing of his older brother.

Set in the Park, a low-income multicultural neighborhood in...

William Butler Yeats's "Byzantium" originally appeared in his 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In this enigmatic work, an unidentified speaker enters a transcendent, fantastical space—the city of Byzantium. Here he...

White Noise was published in 1985 to great critical acclaim; it won the National Book Award and, more importantly, opened up DeLillo's oeuvre to new readers. More than anything, it established DeLillo alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the most...

Fire & Blood is a fantasy book by author George R. R. Martin, first published in 2018. Written as a historical text within the world of Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice universe, the book chronicles the history of House Targaryen, the ruling...

To a Shade is a 1916 poem first published in W.B. Yeats's collection Responsibilities and Other Poems. In this twenty-six-line work, Yeats voices anger and resentment towards Dublin's middle classes on behalf of two historical figures: the late...

Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë's only novel, and it is considered the fullest expression of her highly individual poetic vision. It contains many Romantic influences: Heathcliff is a very Byronic character, though he lacks the self pity that...

12 Angry Men has had a long history of production and revision, from short teleplay to major Broadway productions. Reginald Rose first found inspiration for 12 Angry Men when he served on a jury in a manslaughter case, over which the jurors fought...

"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, originally published in the 1893 collection The Rose. The poem features a speaker who addresses an unnamed listener in the second person. This speaker imagines the listener's future, and...

The Midnight Library is a novel by British author Matt Haig, published in 2020. The book explores the idea of unlived lives through the story of a woman named Nora Seed, who struggles to find meaning in her daily life.

The book follows Nora as she...

Pigeon English (2011) is author Stephen Kelman's debut novel. The text follows the story of Harrison "Harri" Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanaian immigrant who tries to solve the murder of a London boy. Kelman was inspired to write Pigeon English ...

Heroes and Saints is a play written by playwright Cherrie Moraga. It was first performed in 1992. Although set in the fictional town of McLaughlin, Moraga draws from the real-life case of McFarland, California where high exposure to pesticides...