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John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” was published for the first time in the July 18, 1964 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Cheever originally conceived of it as a novel before paring it down from 150 pages to 12. In 1968, the story was...

Uglies is a young-adult science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity dystopia sometime in the future. It is the first in the Uglies trilogy.

Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old on the verge of undergoing a mandatory cosmetic surgery...

"A New England Nun" is a short story published in 1891 by American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The short story was published in one of Freeman's most acclaimed books, A New England Nun and Other Stories. The story is set in a rural New...

Fifty Shades of Grey is the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which recounts the story of Anastasia Steele, a college student who begins a BDSM relationship with the wealthy Christian Grey. Originally, Fifty Shades of Grey and the...

Almost always listed among the greatest poems to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and very often singled out as the ultimate achievement of that cultural efflorescence, Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” was originally published in Survey Magazine on...

Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades" is a short story about Hermann, a calculating officer in the Army Engineers whose extreme greed leads him to obsess over finding out an old countess's magic formula to winning at the gambling game faro....

Premiering in 1784, The Marriage of Figaro is the second play in a trilogy of plays about the character "Figaro" written by the notable French playwright and polymath Pierre Beaumarchais. A continuation of the story The Barber of Seville, the play...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti first published “The Woodspurge” in its final stage under the section “Songs” in his 1870 collection The House of Life. With the publication of 1881’s Poems: A New Edition, “The Woodspurge” was removed from its previous...

In his bestselling nonfiction narrative The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown vividly retells the 1936 University of Washington crew team’s journey to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The rowers won gold against all expectations,...

"Jenny" is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is, for the most part, a dramatic monologue about a prostitute. For most of the poem, the speaker, a wealthy, unmarried man, spends the night watching Jenny sleep. The subject matter in "Jenny" is...

Parasite is a 2019 South Korean film directed by Bong Joon-ho. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, unanimously. The screenplay was written by Bong Joon-ho in collaboration with Han Jin-won, and the film stars...

Set in 1975, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again is a novel written in verse that follows ten-year-old protagonist Kim Hà and her family as they flee Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and adapt to life as refugees in Alabama.

Published in...

William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” consist of five verses composed between 1798 and 1801. They include “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” “I travelled among unknown men,” “Three years she grew in sun and...

John Milton’s “On The Morning of Christ's Nativity,” also known as the "Nativity Ode," is a poem about the birth of Christ, and also a poem about the birth of a poet. When Milton wrote the poem in 1629, he was 21 and had not yet published a...

Of Jonson's works, the satires are some of his most well-known. Every Man in His Humour was written in 1598 and was the first of his many "humour plays." Following Every Man in His Humour was a sequel, Every Man Out of His Humour. Though the first...

William Wordsworth, along with Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge, is one of the "Lakeland Poets," a group that is widely credited with beginning the English Romantic Movement. The movement was characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment,...

Shelley’s poetry covers a variety of themes, but a reader of his poetry will almost always perceive some hint of radicalism, a challenge to one institutional tyranny or another: monarchy, government, church, or court. Thus, when analyzing Shelley’...

"The Nose" is a satirical, absurdist short story written by Nikolai Gogol between 1832 and 1833.

In "The Nose," Gogol seeks to show the image of an empty and bombastic man, Kovalev, who loves appearances, high social status, and favor from his...

One of Us is Lying is a fictional mystery book published in 2017. The book follows four narrators—Bronwyn Rojas, Nate Macauley, Addy Prentiss, and Cooper Clay—in the two months after their classmates Simon Kelleher’s death by peanut allergy.

After...

Based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, Disney's 1998 animated film Mulan takes place during the Chinese Han dynasty and follows the titular Fa Mulan as she impersonates a man in order to take the place of her ailing father and fight against the...

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan is a 2012 children's novel written in the voice of Ivan, an artistic gorilla who lives in a mall as a customer attraction. After Stella the elephant dies from neglect, Ivan comes to terms with his...

Salt to the Sea is a young-adult historical fiction novel published on February 2, 2016. It is Ruta Sepetys’s third novel. Like Sepetys’s other three novels, Salt to the Sea explores the lost and forgotten stories of history. In particular, it...

12 Years a Slave is a 2013 film directed by Steve McQueen, with a screenplay by John Ridley. It is based on the memoir of the same name, written in 1853 by Solomon Northup, and tells the story of a black man from the northern U.S. who was abducted...

Peter Abrahams's 1946 novel Mine Boy follows a young farm boy from the northern part of South Africa named Xuma as he moves to Johannesburg to work in a gold mine. As Xuma's heart is broken by a black woman who wishes to be white, and he is...