Curated category
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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- Jane EyreJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell.
- 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…
- Antony and CleopatraThe story of Antony and Cleopatra begins in 1579 with a translation by Sir Thomas North. This English version of Plutarch's Lives provided the raw material…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.