Curated playlist
Love stories
- As You Like ItAs You Like It, William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy believed written in 1599, opens not with a grand battle or a royal proclamation but with a wrestling match. A young man named Orlando steps into that ring carrying nothing but his…
- CinderellaCinderella is a folk tale so ancient and so widely shared that scholars have counted thousands of variants told across nearly every culture on earth. An eagle snatches a sandal from a bathing woman and drops it into the lap of a king. A…
- Romeo and JulietRomeo and Juliet begins with a curse. Before a single scene has played out, a Chorus steps forward to tell the audience that two young lovers are already doomed. "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life," the prologue announces, and…
- The Sun Also RisesThe Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's first novel, opens on a wound that cannot be spoken of plainly. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, is in love with a woman named Brett Ashley. They both know they have no chance at a stable…
- Jane EyreJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell. The author was Charlotte Bronte, and she had written something that reviewers struggled to place. One called…
- Troilus and CressidaTroilus and Cressida, written by William Shakespeare probably in 1602, arrives with a strange and unsettling preface. One printing of the 1609 quarto announces it as a play recently performed on stage. The other printing declares it a new…
- Antony and Cleopatra'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety': Enobarbus says this about Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Four centuries of argument have proved him right about her complexity. The King's Men first…
- Gone with the Wind (novel)Gone with the Wind arrived in bookstores in June 1936 at the virtually unprecedented price of three dollars, and within months it had sold roughly a million copies to a country still climbing out of the Great Depression. Margaret Mitchell,…
- The Taming of the ShrewThe Taming of the Shrew opens not with a wedding or a courtship, but with a prank. A mischievous nobleman finds a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly passed out, and decides to convince him he is a nobleman himself. Servants dress Sly in…
- Titanic (1997 film)Titanic, the 1997 film written and directed by James Cameron, began not on a Hollywood lot but at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On the 1st of September 1995, Cameron and his crew descended to the actual wreck of the RMS Titanic,…
- The Two Gentlemen of VeronaThe Two Gentlemen of Verona holds a peculiar distinction among Shakespeare's works: it may be the play that started everything. Written somewhere between 1589 and 1593, it features a cast of characters so small that no other Shakespeare…