Donald Barthelme's Snow White, published in 1967, is a postmodernist retelling of the Snow White fairytale. Snow White and the seven dwarves—Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem, and Dan—share an apartment and the novel loosely focuses on the...

"Gretel in Darkness" is a 1975 poem by the American poet Louise Glück, exploring themes of trauma and justice through a retelling of the well-known fairytale "Hansel and Gretel." It was first published in Glück's collection The House on the...

“1914” is a war poem, written by famed poet and author, Wilfred Owen, who also served as a soldier during World War I. The poem was published posthumously as Owen died in action in 1918.

This poem uses the seasons to describe the reckoning effects...

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse is one of Anne Carson’s early fictional works, following Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Plainwater (1995). Published in 1998 to general acclaim, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was...

To a Mouse is a poem written by Scottish poet Robert Burns, published in 1785.

The poem describes the speaker’s regret at accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest. The speaker is forced to think about many others in a similar situation, in which...

"Amends" is a poem by the lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Written in 1995, it was published fairly late in her career, in the collection Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995. The book responds to an American democracy Rich perceived...

"Ae Fond Kiss" is a lyric poem written by Robert Burns in which a speaker addresses his lover on the occasion of their permanent parting. It was first published in the fourth volume of the series Scots Musical Museum, published by James Johnson,...

“Easter, 1916” is one of Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s most famous poems. The poem was written about an event known as the “Easter Rising.” On Easter Sunday of 1916, a group of Irish Republicans who wanted an independent Irish republic...

Snow is a novel by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, originally written in Turkish in 2002. Two years later in 2004, it was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published for an Anglophone audience.

The novel—which follows a Turkish poet named...

Ti-Jean and His Brothers is a 1958 play by the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott. It tells the story of three brothers, Gros Jean, Mi Jean, and Ti-Jean, all of whom attempt to outwit the Devil. Its repetitive structure, in which each brother attempts...

“What Were They Like?” was published in British-American poet Denise Levertov’s 1967 collection The Sorrow Dance. It is an anti-war poem. Levertov had been active in the movement against the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The war gave rise to massive...

The Cat in the Hat, published in 1957, seems like a simple, straightforward text. After all, Theodore Geisel, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, wrote beloved picture books for young children, and he used a total of 236 different words—most of which...

Written in the form of a villanelle, "Mad Girl's Love Song" is a poem by American poet Sylvia Plath. She wrote the poem in 1953 when she was in her third year at college. The poem was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, where she completed...

Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion tells the frightening story of a deadly pandemic. It is an ensemble film that examines the disaster from multiple angles, as different characters grapple with the effects of the pandemic in their personal...

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is a surrealist novel about Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who leaves home to escape an Oedipal curse that predicts he will murder his father and have sex with his mother and sister.

Murakami alternates...

Kanthapura (1938) is Indian author Raja Rao’s most famous work, and especially notable for it being a debut novel written when Rao was only 21 years old. Rao sought to, Alpana Sharma Knippling writes, “experiment with the English language,...