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Written and directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club (1985) is a comedy-drama film about five teenagers who forge unexpected bonds over the course of an all-day detention.

Taking place over eight hours inside a fictional Illinois high school,...

Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. The work was written in Latin and it was published in Louvain (present-day Belgium). Utopia is a work of satire, indirectly criticizing Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. More was a...

Helen Dunmore was a British author whose work addresses themes of motherhood, war, friendship, childhood, and nature. Originally published in her 2007 collection Glad of These Times, the poem “To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is a dramatic monologue in...

"won't you celebrate with me" is a poem by the American writer Lucille Clifton. One of Clifton's better-known works, "won't you celebrate with me" was published in Clifton's 1993 poetry collection Book of Light. Like much of her work, it explores...

Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race is a 2016 memoir about growing up Black in a mostly white suburb of Sydney, Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Covering her early childhood to the end of high school, Clarke details the near-constant racist...

Volpone was published first in 1607 as a quarto and then in 1616 as part of Jonson's collected Workes. In the later edition, the date of the first performance of Volpone is listed as 1605. However, many scholars speculate that the first...

Flight Behavior, published in 2012, explores a young woman's life as a housewife in fictional Feathertown, Tennessee. Dellarobia Turnbow quickly attracts both local and national attention after discovering a large colony of monarch butterflies in...

The Manuscript: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight exists in only one original manuscript, as the last of four poems in the MS. Cotton Nero A x. dating no later than 1400. The three poems preceding it are Pearl, Purity, and Patience, and all four are...

Maleficent (2014) is a dark, live-action retelling of Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of Maleficent, the original film's antagonist. The film explores Maleficent's backstory, emphasizing her sympathetic...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work examines the inextricable link between humans and nature. Originally published in Sheers's 2006 poetry collection Skirrid Hill, "Mametz Wood" is a poem that reckons with events from the past; specifically,...

"I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to" is a short poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Published posthumously, it was written during the early 1860s. Like much of Dickinson's work, it is brief and deceptively simple in form and...

Alan Gratz's Refugee is a young-adult novel about three young refugees from different eras: Josef Landau, a German Jew displaced from Nazi Germany; Isabel Fernandez, a Cuban fleeing her starving country in 1994; and Mahmoud Bishara, a Syrian...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet whose work uses nature to symbolize human affairs, emotions, and relationships. First published in Sheers's 2006 collection Skirrid Hill, “Winter Swans” is a poem about a couple experiencing issues in their...

Marc Olden's Black Samurai (1974) is a crime thriller novel about Robert Sand, an American GI who is trained by a Japanese samurai master to become the world's strongest fighter. Working alongside a former US president, Sand uses his martial arts...

Life of Pi began with some casual reading. Yann Martel was perusing through John Updike’s rather negative review of Max and the Cats, a story about a Jewish family who run a zoo in Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. They decide...

Brigid Delaney is a leading Australian travel journalist working for the Guardian as a senior columnist and speechwriter for federal Ministers. Besides working for the Guardian, Delaney has authored two famous books in her native Australian native...

Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997) is a novel about William Henry Devereaux, Jr.'s (also called "Hank") mid-life crisis. Russo's novel is set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania and follows the aforementioned Hank, the misanthropic chairman of...

Born in 1969, Victor Gischler is an American author of crime fiction. Victor Gischler is a Ph.D. graduate in English from Southern Mississippi University, and most of his fiction work is translated into Japanese, Italian, French, and Spanish...

Ben Macintyre is a British author born in 1963 in Oxford, United Kingdom. Throughout Macintyre’s career, he has worked as a The Times newspaper columnist and author. Macintyre's columns vary from contemporary affairs to chronological debates....

Egil Krogh's Integrity (2007) is a book about the Watergate scandal, which rocked the United States and forced President Richard Nixon to resign. In his book, Krogh examines his role as the lawyer in charge of the group called "the plumbers," who...

Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaughn's Jesus Revolution (2018) is a history of the so-called "Jesus Movement," which swept across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. That movement, which Laurie and Vaughn say breathed new life into Christianity,...

The Duchess of Malfi is generally considered to be John Webster’s greatest work. He probably wrote it in either 1613 or 1614, and it was first staged before the end of 1614. The play was first performed by the prestigious King’s Men acting troupe...

The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson's four great comedies. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred in Oxford in 1610. It was also entered into the Stationers' Register in this year, though it might have been written and performed...