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Cal is a 1983 novel by the Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty. It is a story situated during one of the most difficult periods in Irish history, the time known as "the Troubles," when Northern Ireland was divided between Loyalist and...

The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle among perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his...

Jasper Jones tells the story of Charlie Bucktin, a thirteen-year-old boy living in Western Australia during the Vietnam War. He befriends the town outcast, Jasper, but soon finds himself in a dire situation that tests his morality. Charlie helps...

"Miss Brill" is a short story written and published in 1920 by Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand writer. The story was published towards the end of the writer’s life while she was living in London. Mansfield's own life was characterized by...

Most likely written in 1579, but not published until 1595, Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy is a new response to an old charge against the legitimacy of poetry, one that had been leveled against the literary arts at least since Plato in The...

No Sugar is a play written by Jack Davis, published in 1986. It takes place during the Great Depression in Western Australia and follows an Aboriginal family, the Millimuras, as they navigate life on corrupt reservations and contend with the...

First published in the Japanese literary publication Shinchō in January 1922, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove" (or "In a Bamboo Grove") is about a young samurai killed in mysterious circumstances. Pieced together from contradictory...

"In Those Years" is the second poem in Adrienne Rich's Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995). Written after the end of the Reagan presidency, this poem appears in a section of the book entitled "What Kind of Times Are These." It thus...

Invictus is a film from 2009 directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Anthony Peckham about the improvement of the South African Springboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup, which took place during the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Mandela had a...

David Malouf's Ransom (2009) is a profound novel of immense suffering, sorrow, and redemption.

It retells the story of Homer's Iliad from books 22 to 24. While the Iliad covers the entirety of the last year of the Trojan War, a famous conflict in...

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that was first published in 1946. Kazantzakis is a Cretan author who is considered one of the most influential modern Greek writers in history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in...

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was also the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category. The honor was a culmination of her trajectory...

Ran is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's rendering of Shakespeare's King Lear, mixed with an adaptation of the legends of the Japanese daimyō, Mōri Motonari. It was produced in 1985 to critical acclaim, and is widely considered one of the...

Milton wrote “Lycidas” a few months after his friend, Edward King, died in a shipwreck in 1637. The poem is a pastoral elegy—a form of poetry used to memorialize the dead—and has become one of the most famous reflections on loss in the English...

"To Wordsworth" is an altered Shakespearean sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and addressed to William Wordsworth, mourning Wordsworth's turn to reactionary politics exemplified by his 1814 book The Excursion.

In 1814, William Wordsworth...

Translations is a play written by Brian Friel in 1980. It is a play in three acts that looks at language, and the history of cultural imperialism in Ireland. It was first performed at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1980, a decision...

David Mamet’s Oleanna premiered in May 1992, as the first production of Mamet’s Back Bay Theater Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The debut featured William H. Macy as John, an aloof and pretentious academic, and Rebecca Pidgeon as Carol, his...

Shutter Island (2010) is a psychological thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, and Max von Sydow. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film is adapted from Dennis...

Philip Sidney's "Ring Out Your Bells" first appeared under the title of "Dirge" (a song that laments the dead) in Sidney's 1598 volume Certaine Sonets. It may have been written after the marriage of Sidney's former fiancée Lady Penelope Devereux...

"Happy the Man" is one of John Dryden's most familiar short poems to the modern reader. And yet, this poem is not entirely of his own making. In addition to being a playwright and prodigious creator of unique poetic flights of fancy, Dryden began...

“Easter Wings” is perhaps 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most beloved poem. It is famous for its shape: the words on the page are arranged like a pair of wings. Besides “Easter Wings,” Herbert is also well-known for a second...

The Emperor Jones is a play written by Eugene O'Neill and first produced in New York City in 1920. It tells the story of a black American man named Brutus Jones who, after killing another black man in a dice game, escapes jail and goes to a small...

Published in 1962, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson’s final novel before her death in 1965. Told from the perspective of 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, it focuses on the lives of Merricat, her older sister...

"The Nightingale" by Sir Philip Sidney is a poem comprised of two twelve-line stanzas at a time when Italian meter and form were first entering the English literary tradition. Published in a 1598 folio of Sidney’s poems, Certaine Sonets, the poem...