A fresh take on one of the most famous plays ever written. Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House. But what if he stole the story? Laura Kieler was a young writer whose life inspired Ibsen’s play. Now she ...

A conspicuous and alluring newcomer arrives at the poker table...

Emily Dickinson’s poem about a hummingbird is bright, colourful, and fleeting--just like its subject. We pair it with D.H. Lawrence’s later poem about this elusive creature (read to the end!)

In case you missed it, here’s a complex, shifting reflection on the nature of sadness

Read the Old Norse poem that likely inspired the riddle-game in Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’

One man lingers mysteriously at a bleak, noisy train junction made for coming and going, not hanging around

Enjoy this past newsletter about the evocative phrase 'dog days,' which can be found across literature, from the Romans to the Renaissance to the Victorians and beyond

Wordsworth's thoughtful 1807 sonnet about what gets between us and our engagement with Nature

An enchanting encounter with an old acquaintance throws everything into disarray

One of the most moving episodes in Homer's Odyssey didn't make it into the new film version: the moment when Odysseus meets his mother in the Underworld and tries to embrace her.

We're excited to announce the publication of our new book, Ten-Minute Book Club, featuring 90 brilliant 'LitHits' to enjoy

A grueling journey, but one where slow travel gives rise to good stories...

Enjoy our selection of poems about the United States to mark its 250th birthday on the Fourth of July

Enjoy the freezing temperatures of this past newsletter, in which an explorer and his ship's crew are stuck amidst the impassable Arctic ice and confronted by wild creatures...

Lewis Carroll pokes fun at Robert Southey's poem about a venerable man dispensing wise words to the young on how to age well. Here, we give you both poems to enjoy, in reverse order

An early work that put Gertrude Stein on the literary map

Nobody wants to call the shots at this hilarious time-travelling baseball game

A scene from Shakespeare that gave us the phrase "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"

Through the power of the imagination, a young girl transforms daily chores into a form of play

Enjoy this sonnet from our archives describing how love opens a poet's eyes and makes her see things she had completely taken for granted

A lyrical account of a ferry ride

The fatal attraction of a glass of wine

A literary quarrel immortalised in verse: Amy Lowell's poem to fellow poet Ezra Pound

A brief, brilliant flash of literature from our archives: Christina Rossetti at her best

In this revolutionary novella, H. G. Wells established some of the enduring foundations of science fiction.

Jessie Redmon Fauset captures the devastation and surprise of a lovers' quarrel

How do we become what we are? Where does the self come from? Emily Brontë explores these questions in her novel Wuthering Heights, especially in the character of Heathcliff

Lewis Carroll's tales abound with bunnies. Here is the opening of his 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, introducing the first of his many rabbits and giving us a much-loved phrase

Wordsworth revised his famed 'Daffodils,' also known as 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,' in 1815. The earlier version here is perhaps less familiar. Enjoy this past newsletter from our archive

What begins as a careful experiment unfolds into something more dangerous

Searching for a horse, Louise can't help but be drawn to one called St. Mawr...

Ever come across this word? It means an obsessive longing for another person's love, and literature is full of it. Enjoy this past newsletter from our archives

In 1773, the poet Phillis Wheatley boarded a ship to England and turned her departure into poetry

A short, but precise, poem about meetings and partings

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Catholic priest as well as a poet, and was once called on to minister to a dying man, Felix Randal, a blacksmith ('farrier').

In this farcical scene, an acting troupe puts the old saying to the test: “there are no small parts, only small actors.”

This week we return to our 100th LitHits newsletter, first published in 2023, featuring one of Dickinson's most intriguing poems--and a great start to the UK's National Year of Reading

The coming of the new year brings thoughts of the future––and past futures...

Evergreens vie for dominance in this medieval carol

O. Henry's 1899 short story about American frontiersmen preparing for Christmas Day takes an unexpected and characteristically hilarious turn

The final lines of Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House stunned its first audiences--and it still has the power to shock us

A flirtatious and clandestine meeting on the subway--from over a century ago...

St Catherine’s College proposes to elect a Junior Research Fellow in the Humanities. The Fellowship will be tenable for up...

A young boy finds a fiendish way to silence his harshly oppressive guardian

A king rallies his outnumbered troops at the Battle of Agincourt

German soldiers were hired by the British to fight in the American revolutionary war. Here's a snippet of a story about an undead one.