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“The Whitsun Weddings,” the titular poem of a book by the same name, is perhaps the most-discussed poem by Philip Larkin, known as England’s ‘poet laureate of disappointment.’ With eight stanzas of ten lines each, rhyming like Keatsian odes but...

Three Sisters is a play written by Anton Chekhov in 1900. It follows the lives of the Prozorov sisters as their fortune is in decline and they must seek out a happy life against the odds. The play traces various human disappointments, specifically...

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet whose work has risen in prominence since some of her verse was featured in the singer Beyoncé's film Lemonade, released in 2016. Her debut collection—entitled teaching my mother how to give birth—was well...

Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with some elements of the novel that followed, Through the Looking Glass, serving as additional inspiration. In Alice's...

Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a multi-media book of poetry and photography by Claudia Rankine. It was originally published in September 2004. Rankine is a contemporary poet who is known for her idiosyncratic, politically-charged, and multimedia...

Get Out is a satirical horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Prior to making Get Out, Peele was best known as a comedian, and half of the sketch duo Key & Peele, beloved for entertaining and sharp satirical sketches on Comedy...

"Recitatif" is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s only short story. It was published in 1983 in Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women. Though race is a central component of the story about two...

The Door In The Wall is a classic children's novel written by Marguerite de Angeli in 1949. The story takes place in England in the Middle Ages, during the time of the Black Plague.

The book tells the story of a 10-year-old boy named Robin who is...

Green Book is a 2018 American comedy-drama directed and co-written by Peter Farrelly. It is an American story about the Italian-American driver/bouncer for a Jamaican-American black pianist named Don Shirley, who toured the Deep South in 1962. The...

Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was a huge success when it was published on November 18, 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It established Twain’s reputation as a humorist with a great ear for regional...

A Dance of the Forests is one of Wole Soyinka's best-known plays and was commissioned as part of a larger celebration of Nigerian independence. It was a polarizing play that made many Nigerians angry at the time of its production, specifically...

"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1843 in an edition of the long-running periodical The Saturday Evening Post and subsequently included in The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1845). The short story is acclaimed for its probing of...

Neruda wrote “Ode to My Suit” (“Oda al Traje”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, socks, and a watch. The "Odes"—around two hundred and fifty in all—also paid tribute to particular people....

“The Book of Questions III” is one of seventy-four poems contained in Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions" (“El libro de las preguntas”). Thought of another way, “III” is four questions in a book of 316. Each poem, or question, can be read...

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is a Modernist poem written in free verse with occasional rhymes. The major conflict in the poem is between nature, represented by the moon, and culture, represented by the city. It explores themes of memory and fate.

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"Journey of the Magi" was the first poem that T.S. Eliot wrote after his baptism into the Anglican church on July 29, 1927. From that point on, almost everything he wrote propagated the Christian faith. This poem was first published in 1927 by his...

T.S. Eliot wrote "Preludes" between 1910 and 1911 while he was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then in Paris. The poem was included in Eliot's breakout 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Poems, but it was first published in the second...

Neruda wrote “Ode to My Socks” (“Oda a los calcetines”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, clothes, and a watch. The Odes, around two hundred and fifty in all, also paid tribute to...

T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1923, five years after World War I ended in 1918. At the time, Eliot lived as an American expatriate in London, England. His poetry of the 1920s responded to the aftermath of the war, especially its effect on...

The Night Circus is a novel by writer and multimedia artist Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011, it was the author's debut novel. She has acknowledged debts to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige...

The Shape of Water—released in 2017—is rare in Guillermo Del Toro's oeuvre as a film that's relatively optimistic. It's also the first film of Del Toro's to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which it did in 2018. The film also snagged awards...

The story of fireman Guy Montag first appeared in "The Fireman", a short story by Ray Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Montag's story was expanded two years later, in 1953, and was published as Fahrenheit 451. While the novel...

“Affliction I” is one of 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most memorable and loved poems. Herbert was a Welsh poet and priest. His single collection of poems, known as The Temple, was published in 1633 after his early death at the age of...

"The Flowers" is a short story written by Alice Walker, published in 1973 as part of the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. It is only two pages long—565 words total. "The Flowers" describes the carefree life of Myop, a...