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"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. "The New Colossus" is a sonnet written in 1883 by American poet Elizabeth Lazarus, but most people know only this snippet, used to represent the American dream that hundreds of immigrants were...

Alice Walker set to work on a new novel shortly after filing for divorce from her husband in 1976. In the three years since the publication of her short story collection In Love and Trouble, Walker had become a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine,...

The Big Sleep is a 1946 film noir directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as Chandler's iconic hero-detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge. ...

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962 in German. It began as Habermas’s doctoral dissertation. It was a major work, but it was not translated into English in 1989. By that point, Habermas had already systemized...

Six Shooter is a 27 minute 2004 short film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The central actors include Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, and Domhnall Gleeson. McDonagh's film went on to win an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film....

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a play written by English playwright and director Martin McDonagh in 1996. McDonagh was born to an Irish family in London in 1970. Ireland would go on to play a central role in much of McDonagh's work, with several...

Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy to the jazz singer Billie Holiday, who passed away on July 17th, 1959 from cirrhosis of the liver. Holiday was known for her contralto voice, and for her ability to improvise a song on the spot. Her...

Nothing is Janne Teller's first book for young adults, and like her previous books with a more adult leaning, are philosophical adventures that ask more questions than they answer. Nothing, though, has far more in common with William Golding's ...

Stevie Smith was a British poet and author of three novels, including Novel on Yellow Paper. She was born in 1902 in Northeastern England. Her parents divorced when she was young, and as a result she lived with several extended family members....

“The Loaded Dog” was published in 1901 in Henry Lawson’s short story collection titled Joe Wilson and His Mates. Since publication, the story has continued to be one of the most popular of Lawson’s short stories due to the tale’s universally...

Beetlejuice was one of Tim Burton’s first full-length movies, and established him as an unusual, singular, outrageous, and exciting director. The first screenplay for the film was written by Michael McDowell, and was apparently much darker than...

The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play written by English playwright Harold Pinter in 1957. The short play is set in a single basement room. There are only two characters: Gus and Ben, hitmen waiting for a target to arrive.

The play has elements of...

"The Library of Babel" is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. The story was originally published in Borges' 1941 collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, translated as The Garden of Forking Paths. It was later also included in the...

An early Hitchcock film, Rope is not among the Master of Suspense's best known films, but it is certainly notable, and includes many Hitchcockian innovations of horror and suspense. Rope is perhaps most memorable as a notable experimentation in...

Trainspotting is a British black comedy by Danny Boyle, released in 1996. It starred Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Kevin McKidd, and Kelly Macdonald, in an ensemble cast led by McGregor’s protagonist, Mark Renton....

Marilyn is a book written by Filipino-American author Amanda Ngoho Reavey. It is her first novel, centering around the immigrant and Asian-American identity.

Reavey's creation is a multi-media project with poetry, photographs, visual media, and...

"The Scrutiny" or "The Scrutinie", in its older English form, is a poem written by the English poet Richard Lovelace. The year of publication of this particular poem is unknown, but Richard Lovelace wrote poems throughout his entire life, which...

“A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” is a poem written by Craig Raine, an English poet known for his work in Martian poetry. Raine studied at Oxford New College, serving as a professor there, and later becoming the editor of the Areté newspaper,...

This particular poem by Mary Wroth appears in her groundbreaking never-completed prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania which nevertheless was partially published in 1621. This massive work is universally recognized as the first prose...

Hilda Doolittle is known widely by her initials, H.D. “Sea Rose” is one of the poems belonging to Sea Garden (1916), a book of poems in which H.D. examines the themes of gender, sexuality, conformity, and value by using natural scenery as...

Hilda Doolittle—known professionally as H.D.—developed a fascination with Greek mythology early in her career, and was known for harnessing the legends of myth to make broader statements about culture and feminism. In 1923, during her transition...

“Sea Violet" is part of H.D.'s first collection, Sea Garden (1916), a book of poems in which she examines themes of gender, sexuality, conformity, and value through the metaphor and symbolism of flowers. Like "Sea Rose" and "Sea Lily," also from ...

The Death of Woman Wang is a book written by Jonathan Spence and published in 1979. It takes place in 17th century Northern China, in the province of T’an-ch’eng. The book was well-received by critics.

Spence's described events take place in a...

The Romance of the Shop is a novel penned in 1888 by Amy Levy. It is one of the first novels that illuminates the struggles of the New Women, one of the first Feminist movements that gained traction in the United States. The novel's protagonists...