All's Well That Ends Well (1607) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. All's Well That Ends Well was likely inspired by the tale of Giletta di Narbona from Boccaccio's Decameron. Unpopular during Shakespeare's lifetime, the play remains one of his least staged works to this day. Despite this, scholars praise All's Well That Ends Well for its moral ambiguity. "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, our virtues would be proud...

One of George Bernard Shaw's most performed and studied plays, "Arms and the Man" is a classic example of Shaw's comedic wit. First produced in 1894, the play is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian war and tells the story of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, who is engaged to Sergius, a soldier away at war whom she idolizes. While both her father and fiancé are away fighting, Raina, at home with her mother, has a very innocent and romantic idea...

While vacationing at a spa, a sculptor, who's unhappily married, encounters a former model whose love he rejected in favor of a more successful career. As the pair reconnects, they gradually rekindle their relationship, leading them down a dark and dangerous path. Arnold Rubek is a famous and wealthy sculptor who feels trapped in a mundane marriage. He and his wife Maia are visiting a spa, when he stumbles across a former model named Irena. She's...

"¿Por qué hay que leer Crimen y castigo ? Pues porque Crimen y castigo es el producto de un genio cuyo mundo gira entre la muerte y la locura, porque Dostoievski era un tío que retornaba vivo de aquellos tenebrosos mundos (sus ataques) directamente para escribir historias que también puedan ser devoradas por la juventud del siglo XXI. Y porque Fiódor Mijáilovich Dostoievski ha sido el escritor que ha compuesto los análisis psicológicos más...

The Taming of the Shrew (1592) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. Written between 1590 and 1592, The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's earliest works. Frequently critiqued by scholars for its demeaning portrayal of Katherina and for Petruchio's violence, the play has also been considered as an ironic treatment of the inequality experienced by women in marriage. The Taming of the Shrew has served as source material for countless film and...

Johannes Rosmer is a respected member of a conservative community, who's criticized for his close friendship with a young woman following his wife's untimely death. Johannes' unconventional living situation, paired with his growing liberal beliefs, becomes a cause for concern. A year after his wife Beata's suicide, Johannes Rosmer, is sharing his home with another woman. Rebecca, Beata's longtime friend, has been a source of support helping Rosmer...

First published posthumously in 1869, "Paris Spleen" is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. Inspired by Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit - Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot" or "Gaspard of the Night - Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot", Baudelaire remarked that he had read Bertrand's work at least twenty times for starting "Paris Spleen". A commentary on Parisian contemporary life, Baudelaire...

First published in 1609, "The Sonnets" of William Shakespeare are a collection of 154 loosely connected 14 line poems. Considered by many to be among some of the greatest love poetry ever written much debate surrounds the context of the poetry. It has been suggested that the work may be semi-autobiographical but no real evidence firmly supports this notion. The themes of the poems contained within this volume are varied and include such subjects as...

Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He moulded his draughtsmanship, bent it, twisted it, and stretched it to the extreme limits of possibility. There are not any landscapes in Michelangelo's painting. All the emotions, all the passions, all the thoughts of humanity were personified in his eyes...

The era of Anglo-American colonization, while brief, had a great impact on the development of Texas and the United States. Readers will discover what drew Anglo-American settlers to Texas, and what caused hostilities to rise between them and the Mexican Government. Frequent sidebars introduce readers to the key figures of this era.