‘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 home from his friends’ house one summer afternoon, swimming in the various swimming pools he encounters on his route.
‘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 collection Family Pictures as well as several subsequent collections. The poem is dedicated to Brooks’ two children, Nora Brooks Blakely and Henry Blakely […]
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 most-covered song every written? The answer is ‘Yesterday’, now one of the most popular and best-known Beatles songs. […]
‘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 novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, but it is for his poetry that Hughes is now […]
‘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 young girl named Hazel Parker prepares for a race; Bambara uses this plot to explore the challenges young black women face […]