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...

The Grand Illusion (released as La Grande Illusion) is director Jean Renoir's French-language war film which was initially released in 1937. Renoir's film follows a group of French soldiers, led by Captain de Boeldieu and Lieutenant Maréchal, who...

"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 ...

English author Maria Louise Ramé, who operated and published the work under the pseudonym Ouida, published A Dog of Flanders in 1872. The novel is set in Antwerp, Belgium and follows a boy and his dog's adventures in the town. Nello, on one hand,...

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...

British author Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices was published by Collins in 1980. It is set during the height of the Blitz in 1940, when the Nazi Luftwaffe (or German Air Force), battered the United Kingdom nightly with different kinds of bombs....

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...

Firekeeper's Daughter was published in March 2021 by Henry Holt and Co. It was written by Native American author and activist Angeline Boulley, who has spent most of her life devoted to improving the lives and education of Native American people....

"B. Wordsworth" is Trinidadian-British author V.S. Naipaul's short story first published in 1959 in his acclaimed collection entitled Miguel Street. The short story is told from Naipaul's point of view, and explores his relationship (in the story,...

It would be fair to say that Ralph Ellison is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man (not to be confused with H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man). Some historians have called "The Black Ball," one of author Ralph Ellison's most...

"At Hiruharama" is acclaimed English author Penelope Fitzgerald's short story first published as a part of her short story collection entitled The Means of Escape, which was first published in 2000, when Fitzgerald was 84. Fitzgerald's short story...

“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:...

The Drought was initially published in 1964 as The Burning World. It was retitled as The Drought and published by Berkley Books in 1965. In the early 1960s, at the start of his career, author J.G. Ballard wrote a series of science fiction novels....

Memory of Water is Finnish novelist Emmi Itäranta's debut novel, published in 2014 by HarperCollins. Itäranta's novel is set in a dystopian future in which water has become scarce because of climate change caused by humanity. As a result of the...