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The Vita Nova is the first work attributed to Dante. It is a prosimeter (a genre that combines prose sections and verse compositions) that contains 31 lyrics and has a narrative framework of 42 chapters.

The work has been in circulation since the...

Plautus was a Roman comic playwright, living from approximately 254 BC to 184 BC, and The Brothers Menaechmus is frequently considered to be his greatest work. Plautus’ comedies are the earliest Latin works to have survived in their entirety, and...

Molly's Game (2017) tells the true story of a woman named Molly Bloom who went from world-class Olympic level skier to illegal poker game organizer after a devastating injury in a qualifying event for the 2002 Winter Olympics. As her game grows...

“Love (III)” is the final poem in George Herbert’s 1633 volume The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. In this volume, "Love (I)" discusses the difference between divine and mortal love, while "Love (II)" prays to God for the speaker to...

"Prayer (I)" is a sonnet from Hebert’s The Temple. “Prayer (I)” is a sonnet that can be viewed as a series of phrases describing and elaborating on the concept of Christian prayer. As a sonnet, it places itself in the tradition of love poetry. The...

H Is for Hawk (published in 2014), is author Helen Macdonald's memoir. Set over a period of a year, Macdonald chronicles the time she spent training a northern goshawk after the death of her father, whom she loved dearly (her father, by the way,...

Noli Me Tángere, known in English as Touch Me Not (a literal translation of the Latin title) or The Social Cancer, is often considered the greatest novel of the Philippines, along with its sequel, El filibusterismo. It was originally written in...

If I Stay is a young-adult novel narrated from the perspective of Mia, a seventeen-year-old girl whose mother, father and brother die in a car crash that puts Mia's body into a coma and her consciousness into an out-of-body state. Starting just...

Edith Mary Pargeter (born in 1913, died in 1995) was an English writer, especially known for historical fiction as well as her murder mysteries. Through her popular historical crime series featuring a Benedictine monk in the 12th century, Pargeter...

Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (released in 1951) tells the story of two strangers who initially meet on a train headed to Washington D.C. One man, Bruno, is a charismatic and charming psychopath; the other, Guy, is a tennis player. Bruno...

Written by actor and playwright Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class (1977) examines a family tragedy. Set in a farmhouse in the Western United States, follows an interesting family. Although they have enough to eat, they don't have enough to...

The Naga's Journey is set in modern-day Bangkok, a city that is degenerating rapidly, both morally, in its acceptance of a flourishing sex trade, and physically, under constant threat of a flood of such great magnitude that its potential for...

Bhasa is one of the most celebrated Indian playwrights writing in Sanskrit, an ancient language used for the majority of early Hindu and Buddhist spiritual and philosophical texts. Although the precise dates of his life and work are not known,...

Zoot Suit was written by Luis Valdez, a Mexican-American playwright and director who is widely known as the father of Chicano theater. It weaves together the story of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trials with the Zoot Suit riots, both of which took...

Because of Winn-Dixie is Kate DiCamillo's first novel, and it catapulted her into the top category of children's writers working today. The book has won a number of prestigious awards, including a Newberry Honor Distinction in 2001. The New York...

A graphic novel by cartoonist David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (2009) tells the story of the eponymous Asterios Polyp, a professor from Cornell University in New York. After a sudden lightning strike destroys his apartment, Polyp takes up...

Director Rachel Lears began to work on the film that became Knock Down the House the day after Donald J. Trump won the office of the President of the United States. The film follows four Democratic candidates: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New...

The White Helmets is a short documentary film released in 2016, following the daily lives of the Syrian Civil Defence, who are nicknamed the White Helmets. Each of these men is a volunteer who becomes part of a team that focuses on medical...

Satellites is a play by critically acclaimed playwright Diana Son. Commissioned by the Public Theater, it was presented in the 2004 “New Work Now!” which recognized works from emerging or established playwrights. The play opened on June 18, 2006....

In early 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley set off for Italy with their two children, along with Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron's mistress, and Allegra, Byron's daughter. By December, Shelley found himself in dire straits. His first wife Harriet had...

On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth attended a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. She approached the speaker’s platform and asked “May I say a few words?” The speech she gave that day was transcribed by Marius Robinson, a reporter in the...

The 2000 Japanese dystopian thriller Battle Royale was based on the novel of the same name that was written in 1999 by Japanese journalist Koushun Takami. It follows the story of a group of junior high schoolers who live in a Japan governed by a...

Directed by Hassan Fazili, Midnight Traveler is, at its core, a documentary about refugees -- most prominently about the films director, Hassan Fazili. After the terrorist group The Taliban puts a bounty out on Fazili and his family's head, they...

Written as a series of periodical essays from 1867 to 1868 and published in Cornhill Magazine, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy was collected as a book in 1869. In the book, Arnold examines Victorian culture in England. He questions how...