"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...

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 ...

Ada Limón was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, a home she would leave but look back fondly on during her poetic career. Limón's interest in creative writing grew at the University of Washington, where as an undergraduate she studied theatre in...

Colson Whitehead is one of the most acclaimed and awarded American writers at work today. To date, he has won the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a prestigious MacArthur Genius...

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a film about the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial France in the 1950s. Shot in documentary style with a cast of non-professional actors, the film depicts the guerrila attacks of...

“Barn Owl” (1969) is the first part of a two-part poem (a “diptych”) by Gwen Harwood, called “Father and Child.” As the name of the diptych indicates, “Father and Child” explores the relationship between a child and her father. In “Barn Owl,” the...

Crying in H Mart is a memoir by author and singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner. It recounts her relationship with her mother, particularly as it relates to food and Korean culture.

The memoir examines Zauner's close relationship with her mother,...

"September 1913" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written on the occasion of the 1913 Dublin lock-out dispute between Dublin's workers and the merchants and shopkeepers who made up the city's...

"The End of Poetry" is the final poem in Ada Limón's sixth book, The Hurting Kind (2022). Limón, considered "one of America's preeminent poets" by Publishers Weekly and named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, takes an ironic approach in this poem:...