2023-02-05 18:00
‘The Most Dangerous Game’ is a classic adventure story, first published in 1924. It is now the story for which its author, Richard Connell (1893-1949), is best-remembered, and cr… Read More
Blog Directory > Books & Literature Blogs > Interesting Literature | A Library of Literary Int books-and-literature Blog >
Interesting Literature | A Library Of Literary Int Blog
interestingliterature.wordpress.com
Tags:
rose
character
hughes
symbolism
dangerous
poem
civil rights
acircthose winter sundaysacirc
essay
acirca rose
A Library of Literary Interestingness
2023-02-05 15:00
‘Those Winter Sundays’ is a 1962 poem by the American poet and essayist Robert Hayden (1913-80). It is probably his most widely anthologised and frequently studied poem, and aros… Read More
2023-02-04 18:00
Shel Silverstein (1930-99) was a popular American poet, cartoonist, musician, singer-songwriter, and man of many artistic talents. His most enduring poems are those which he wrote for younge… Read More
2023-02-04 15:00
‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a curious work in George Orwell’s canon. It is often reprinted with his essays, but in some ways Orwell’s account of his time working as a p… Read More
2023-02-03 18:00
‘A Rose for Emily’ is one of the most widely studied American short stories of the twentieth century, but the subtle narrative style and William Faulkner’s use of symbolism… Read More
2023-02-03 15:00
‘Theme for English B’ is a 1951 poem by Langston Hughes (1901-67), one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. In the poem, a young African-American man studying at a c… Read More
2023-02-02 18:00
‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner contains some memorable characters besides Emily herself. Even the narrator is a curious creation and deserving of further discussion, sinc… Read More
2023-02-02 15:00
‘The Lottery’ by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65) was first published on 26 June 1948 in the New Yorker magazine. The story was initially met with anger and even a f… Read More
2023-02-01 18:00
William Faulkner’s celebrated short story ‘A Rose for Emily’, which was initially published in Forum in 1930 before being reprinted in his short-story collection These Thir… Read More
2023-02-01 15:00
The American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – and beyond – was a political movement which often used art to help change popular opinion. Poets associated with civil… Read More
2023-01-31 15:00
‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is a 1968 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Like much of his fiction, this story is an ex… Read More
2023-01-30 15:00
‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ is probably the best-known poem by Shel Silverstein. A popular poem for children, it was first published in 1974. The poem describes a hidden other worl… Read More
2023-01-29 15:00
‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club, her 1989 novel containing a seri… Read More
2023-01-28 15:00
‘We Wear the Mask’ is a poem by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), written in 1895 and included in Dunbar’s 1896 collection Majors and Minors. In t… Read More
2023-01-27 15:00
‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ is a widely studied short story by the American writer Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). This classic short story, which was first published in The Century… Read More
2023-01-26 15:00
‘My Papa’s Waltz’ is one of the most popular and most widely studied poems by the American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-63). In this poem, published in 1948, Roethke recalls… Read More
2023-01-25 15:00
‘Two-Headed Calf’ is a short poem by the American poet Laura Gilpin (1950-2007). If Gilpin had written nothing else besides this nine-line poem she would be fondly remembered by… Read More
2023-01-24 15:00
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84) was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in… Read More
2023-01-23 15:00
‘Everyday Use’ is one of the most popular and widely studied short stories by Alice Walker. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1973 before being collected in Wa… Read More
2023-01-22 15:00
‘Cathedral’ is perhaps the most widely studied of all the short stories of Raymond Carver (1938-88). The story is narrated by a man whose wife has invited her friend, a blind man… Read More
2023-01-21 15:00
Previously, we selected ten poems about fire, but what about fire’s elemental opposite? What are the best poems about ice and icy things, whether the poem deals in literal ice and icy… Read More
2023-01-20 15:00
‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The J… Read More
2023-01-19 15:00
‘A Poison Tree’ is one of the poems from William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. This poem – one of h… Read More
2023-01-18 15:00
Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) holds a special place in American literature, and has a notable claim to fame. Her life as one of the first immigrants to the New World in the 1630s helped to infor… Read More
2023-01-17 15:00
‘Phenomenal Woman’ is a 1994 poem by the American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Angelou was a singer, dancer, composer, actor, teacher, memoirist, and poet: a woman of many tale… Read More
2023-01-16 15:00
‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is a 1973 short story by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). A powerful tale which its author described as a ‘psychomyth… Read More
2023-01-15 15:00
‘Ocean Eyes’ is a well-known song by Billie Eilish. However, this lyric isn’t a self-penned composition, unlike many of Eilish’s other hits. Instead, it was actually… Read More
2023-01-14 15:00
‘The Tyger’ is not only one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827): it is only of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language… Read More
2023-01-13 15:00
‘The Swimmer’ (1964) is John Cheever’s best-known story. This tale, which fuses realist and surrealist elements, is about a middle-aged married man who decides to travel ho… Read More
2023-01-12 15:00
‘Speech to the Young’, full title ‘Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward’, is a poem by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, included in her 1970 collecti… Read More
2023-01-11 15:00
Here’s a question for you. Which classic song began as Scrambled Eggs, was a song that the songwriter couldn’t convince any other singer to record, and yet went on to become the… Read More
2023-01-10 15:00
‘Harlem’ is a short poem by Langston Hughes (1901-67). Hughes was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. Over the course of a varied career he was a nov… Read More
2023-01-09 15:00
‘Raymond’s Run’ is a 1971 short story by Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95) which originally appeared in the anthology Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. In the story, a you… Read More
2023-01-08 15:00
‘Morning Poem’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimat… Read More
2023-01-07 15:00
‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is a well-known poem by Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It is the title poem from Angelou’s 1993 collection Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, which… Read More
2023-01-06 15:00
Let’s begin our exploration of Churchill’s famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech with a few problematic statements: In June 1940, Winston Churchill gave a speech… Read More
2023-01-05 15:00
‘The Distances’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84), published in his 1951 collection Bestiary. In the story, a woman discovers her ‘… Read More
2023-01-04 15:00
‘Firework’ is one of Katy Perry’s best-known songs, and its lyrics were inspired by a classic work of literature, so we thought we’d consider Katy Perry’s song… Read More
2023-01-03 21:30
‘The Swan’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she… Read More
2023-01-02 15:00
‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ is a polemical essay by James Baldwin (1924-87), published in 1949. In the essay, Baldwin outlines the problem with novels which highlight the o… Read More
2022-12-30 15:00
‘Young Goodman Brown’ is an 1835 short story by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story contains a number of powerfu… Read More
2022-12-28 15:00
The short stories of the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) are important precursors to twentieth-century modernism, and can be viewed as forerunners to the short fiction of Katherine M… Read More
2022-12-26 15:00
‘The Bloody Chamber’ is the title story in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection of fairy tales rewritten from a feminist perspective. In the story, the longest in the collection… Read More
2022-12-23 15:00
‘Mindful’ is a popular poem by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), an American poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves (and who has been criticised… Read More
2022-12-21 15:00
‘The Agony and the Sweat’ is the title sometimes given to one of the most memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speeches: the American novelist William Faulkner’s acceptance of… Read More
2022-12-19 15:00
‘In This Place (An American Lyric)’ is a poem by the contemporary American poet Amanda Gorman (born 1998). The poem is an example of what is known as an occasional poem, or a poe… Read More
2022-12-16 15:00
‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing… Read More
2022-12-14 15:00
‘Power’ is a 1978 poem by the African-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-92), published in her collection The Black Unicorn. Lorde was a self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother… Read More
2022-12-12 15:00
What are the most important quotations in Shirley Jackson’s well-known 1948 short story ‘The Lottery’? This deeply unsettling story about a village which annually selects a… Read More
2022-12-09 15:00
‘The Swimmer’ is a 1964 short story by the American writer John Cheever (1912-82), published in his collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. Cheever’s best-known story… Read More
2022-12-07 15:00
The story of Narcissus is one of the most enduringly popular, and instantly recognisable, from classical myth. The very name of Narcissus has become a kind of shorthand for self-love and sel… Read More
2022-12-05 15:00
‘And of Clay We Are Created’ is a short story by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (born 1942), included in her 1989 collection The Stories of Eva Luna. In the story, a mountain… Read More
2022-12-02 15:00
‘Girl’ is a short story by the Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid (born 1949). In this very short story, which runs to just a couple of pages, a mother offers advice to her teen… Read More
2022-11-30 15:00
‘The Journey’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimate… Read More
2022-11-28 15:00
‘Simmering’ is a short story by the Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood (born 1939). Published in Atwood’s 1983 collection Murder in the Dark, the story might be regar… Read More
2022-11-25 15:00
‘Salvador Late or Early’ is a short story in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). The s… Read More
2022-11-23 15:00
‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was published whi… Read More
2022-11-21 15:00
‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is a 1966 short story by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. It is regarded by many critics as Oates’ best story, and is wide… Read More
2022-11-18 15:00
‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ is perhaps the best-known short story by the American writer Raymond Carver (1938-88). The story sees four characters, who form two r… Read More
2022-11-16 15:00
‘From Blossoms’ is a 1986 poem by the American poet Li-Young Lee. In the poem, a speaker celebrates the joyful experience of buying and eating some peaches which began life as fl… Read More
2022-11-14 15:00
‘The Locusts’ is a short chapter or tale within The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s 1950 science fiction novel which describes human exploration of, and settlement on, t… Read More
2022-11-11 15:00
‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man’ is a short story by the American author Richard Wright (1908-60), originally published as ‘Almos’ a Man’ in Harper’s Bazaar… Read More
2022-11-09 15:00
‘If We Must Die’ is a poem by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-American poet who is often regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem was originally… Read More
2022-11-07 15:00
‘What Sally Said’ is a short story or vignette from Sandra Cisneros’ 1984 novel The House on Mango Street. Cisneros, born in 1954, is a Mexican-American author whose fictio… Read More
2022-11-04 15:00
‘The Flowers’ is a 1973 short story by Alice Walker. Running to just two pages and under 600 words, the story can be regarded as an example of flash fiction or micro-fiction. It… Read More
2022-11-02 15:00
‘Gretel in Darkness’ is a 1975 poem by Louise Glück. The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by Gretel, the little girl from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. In the poem… Read More
2022-10-31 15:00
‘The Village’ is a chapter from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book details Thoreau’s decision to leave behind modern civilisation… Read More
2022-10-28 14:00
‘The Voice from the Wall’ is a story from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. The story is narrated by Lena St. Clair, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an Anglo-Iri… Read More
2022-10-26 14:00
‘I Have a Dream’ is one of the greatest speeches in American history. Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) in Washington D.C. in 1963, the speech is a powerful rallying… Read More
2022-10-24 14:00
‘The Last Night of the World’ is a short story by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), published in Esquire magazine in February 1951 before being reprinted in his 1952… Read More
2022-10-21 14:00
‘Self-Reliance’ is an influential 1841 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson argues that we should get to know our true s… Read More
2022-10-19 14:00
Here’s a question for you. Who was the main speaker at the event which became known as the Gettysburg Address? If you answered ‘Abraham Lincoln’, this post is for you. For… Read More
2022-10-17 14:00
‘The Man I Killed’ is a story from The Things They Carried, a 1990 collection of linked short stories by the American writer Tim O’Brien. The collection focuses on a platoo… Read More
2022-10-14 14:00
‘Half and Half’ is one of the stories from Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Told by a Chinese American woman named Rose Hsu Jordan, ‘Half and Half’ incor… Read More
2022-10-12 14:00
‘Village People’ is a short story by Bessie Head (1937-86), a South African writer who, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana’s most influential write… Read More
2022-10-10 14:00
‘Continuity of Parks’ is a 1956 short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84). In the story, which is just two pages long, a man reads a novel in which tw… Read More
2022-10-07 14:00
‘Sticks’ is a very short story by the contemporary American writer George Saunders (born 1958), who is perhaps best-known for his 2017 Booker-Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the B… Read More
2022-10-05 14:00
The work of the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves, yet it’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet… Read More
2022-10-03 14:00
‘Harrison Bergeron’ is a 1961 short story by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). The story can be categorised as ‘dystopian satire’ or a ‘satirical d… Read More
2022-09-30 14:00
‘Eleven’ is a short story by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). In the story, a girl’s eleventh birthday is ruined when her teacher forces her to take respons… Read More
2022-09-28 14:00
If, as the old quip has it, Hamlet is a great play but it has too many quotations in it, a similar charge might be laid against Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. So man… Read More
2022-09-26 14:00
‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ is one of the best-known short stories by Flannery O’Connor (1925-64), who produced a string of powerful stories during her short life. First p… Read More
2022-09-23 14:00
Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury is among the most famous and iconic speeches in English history. On 9 August 1588, Elizabeth addressed the land forces which had bee… Read More
2022-09-21 14:00
Friendship is such a universal and central theme to all of our lives, that picking just a small number of the best short stories about such a broad theme is always going to be a challenge. H… Read More
2022-09-19 14:00
‘Witches’ Loaves’ is a short story by the US short-story writer O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). His stories are characterised by their iron… Read More
2022-09-16 14:00
The Valkyries are a key part of Norse myth. But who are the Valkyries, and what role do they play in the stories of northern Europe? Many of us are familiar with the piece of music by the Ge… Read More
2022-09-14 14:00
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a leading figure in English Romanticism. As well as co-authoring the landmark 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads with his friend William Wordsworth, Cole… Read More
2022-09-12 14:00
‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is one of the fairy tales for children written by the Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). It was published in the 1888 collection The Happy Prince and O… Read More
2022-09-09 14:00
‘The Ice Palace’ is a short story by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1920. The story is about a sout… Read More
2022-09-07 14:00
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) is widely recognised as one of the greatest – and most lyrical – science-fiction writers of the twentieth century, although he preferred to describe hims… Read More
2022-09-05 14:00
Although it was a last-minute addition, the myth of the Fisher King plays an important part in one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Wast… Read More
2022-09-02 14:00
The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the leading figures in second-generation Romanticism. Along with his contemporaries Byron and Keats, Shelley led the way in Engli… Read More
2022-08-31 14:00
‘What is Enlightenment?’, full title ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). As the longer tit… Read More
2022-08-29 14:00
What are the best short stories which are set in school, or which focus on school and one’s schooldays? There are plenty of stories which are ‘set in schools’ in the sense… Read More
2022-08-26 14:00
Love is obviously a key subject in much classic poetry. But what are the best sensual love poems ever written: those poems which carry an erotic frisson which speaks of desire as well as dev… Read More
2022-08-24 14:00
‘A Description of the Morning’ is a 1709 poem by the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Published in The Tatler, Swift’s poem displays his keen eye for contempo… Read More
2022-08-22 14:00
Postmodernism came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. As the name suggests, postmodernism developed out of modernism: it came after modernism, both in the sense that… Read More
2022-08-19 14:00
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-50), who is better-known to the world as George Orwell, was one of the leading English essayists of the first half of the twentieth century, writing about everything… Read More
2022-08-18 14:00
‘Breakfast’ is a short story by John Steinbeck (1902-68), the shortest piece to be included in his collection The Long Valley. The story first appeared in The Pacific Weekly in 1… Read More
2022-08-17 14:00
The work of the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves, yet it’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet… Read More
Subscribe to Interesting Literature | A Library Of Literary Int
Get updates delivered right to your inbox!