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Set in a dystopian near-future Britain, Alan Moore's 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta follows an anarchist revolutionary named V as he seeks vengeance against the former administrators of a concentration camp and topples the country's...

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The book consists of twelve stories that focus on the lives of Nigerians living in both Africa and in the United States. Many of the stories in the...

Le Pur et l'impur was written in 1932 by French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. It is not a traditional novel in its structure; it consists of different conversations about sex, sexual attraction and gender, and is far less fictional than its...

First performed on the London stage in 1905, Man and Superman is an extraordinary play precisely because it inverts so many of the traditional or expected roles of theater. On its surface, this play, by George Bernard Shaw, is a standard romantic...

Before co-writing the screenplay for The Last Samurai, co-producer and director Edward Zwick and writer Marshall Herskowitz were best known for writing, producing and directing the groundbreaking television drama series thirtysomething. The movie...

There are some films that are almost more famous for one line spoken within them; Rob Reiner's 1992 legal drama, A Few Good Men, is one of those films, Starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore, it was adapted for the big screen by Aaron...

Master Class is a play by critically acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally. It premiered in 1995 at the John Golden Theater in New York City. The play, set in the 1970s, tells a fictional version of opera masterclasses by the real-life opera...

Love! Valour! Compassion! is a play written by Terrence McNally, that was performed in Broadway in 1995 after transferring from a traditional theatre in 1994. The play premiered on 11 October 1994 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where it ran for a...

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in American schools to be unlawful. Five years later, Tennessee Williams published Sweet Bird of Youth against a backdrop of political change; segregationist Jim Crow laws were...

Writing and drawing are identical gestures made with the hand.

Poet and author Renee Gladman begins her collection of poems, Calamities, by making this statement, and throughout her literary career, Gladman has shown that she likes to fuse...

Set in a World War I dugout from March 18 to March 21, 1918, R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play Journey's End follows Captain Stanhope as he deals with alcoholism and symptoms of PTSD while commanding a group of British army officers in the lead up to...

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is a play in two acts by Canadian playwright George Ryga. It is a play of significant cultural and social importance, which has been used by Indigenous activists as a means of forcing dominant structures to face the reality...

First-time director Sarah Daggar-Nickson's 2018 film A Vigilante is the story of Sadie, an abused wife-turned-vigilante who manages to escape from her violent husband and begins to study martial arts, survival skills and boxing so that she can...

Madame Butterfly is a three-act opera by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini based on the short story of the same name penned in 1898 by John Luther Long. The short story was inspired by stories that Long's sister, Jennie Correll, told him about an...

Written by American author Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (published in 2007) tells the story of a rather gifted young man named Kvothe, who aims to become the most notorious wizard in the entire world. Rothfuss' novel follows Kvothe from...

Edward II, first performed probably between 1587-1592 and published in 1594, is one of Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe’s most famous works. Based off of the history of King Edward II, the play depicts the king’s homosexuality and love...

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Paul Limbert Allman was a prodigious writer, writing nearly a half dozen books and countless essays and plays. Among his most famous essays is "The Frequency," which was published by the prestigious Harper's...

"The Good Daughter" is an autobiographical essay by American author Caroline Hwang. The essay gives the details of Hwang's internal struggle of being both a Korean and an American, and having parents that follow a strict Korean culture in a...

When you are the author of one of the most successful children's fiction series of all time, deciding how to follow up on your success can be quite a dilemma. Fortunately, J.K. Rowling decided to commit to a number of "firsts" when she tackled the...

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” was published for the first time in the July 18, 1964 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Cheever originally conceived of it as a novel before paring it down from 150 pages to 12. In 1968, the story was...

Uglies is a young-adult science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity dystopia sometime in the future. It is the first in the Uglies trilogy.

Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old on the verge of undergoing a mandatory cosmetic surgery...

"A New England Nun" is a short story published in 1891 by American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman. The short story was published in one of Freeman's most acclaimed books, A New England Nun and Other Stories. The story is set in a rural New...

River Thieves is a novel by Canadian author and poet Michael Crummey, originally published in 2001. The novel follows the story of the Peyton family, who have newly arrived in the New World, in the early 1800's. They set up shop in Newfoundland,...

Fifty Shades of Grey is the first installment of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which recounts the story of Anastasia Steele, a college student who begins a BDSM relationship with the wealthy Christian Grey. Originally, Fifty Shades of Grey and the...