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Avatar is a science-fiction movie directed and produced by James Cameron, and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was released on December 10, 2009. The film is set in the middle of the 22nd century, and follows the colonization of Pandora, a moon...

From an incredibly young age, Phillis Wheatley showed an immense precocity for the written word, and gained international acclaim for her elegy "On the Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770." Many of Wheatley's writings center around religious...

The War of the Worlds is a science-fiction classic. First released in serial form in 1897, The War of the Worlds was later released as a book in 1898 through William Heinemann of London. Though it was published after some of Wells' major works...

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a lyrical Romantic ballad written by poet John Keats. An unknown speaker begins a conversation with a lonely knight on the road, reflecting the ballad's roots in an oral tradition. Employing colloquial language, the...

Saint Joan is a play written by Bernard Shaw, premiering in 1923. In the early 1920s, Shaw was experiencing a period of professional depletion. Between 1918 and 1920, he had written a cycle of 5 interconnected plays called Back to Methuselah. When...

The Ghost Sonata (Swedish title: Spöksonaten) was written in 1907 and first performed on January 21st, 1908 at Strindberg’s Intimate Theater in Stockholm. The play was unpopular among theatrical critics of the time and only secured critical...

Brick Lane is the first novel by Monica Ali. Despite being the work of an unknown writer, the novel was hotly anticipated. She earned a book deal with a significant advance based on some preliminary chapters. In January 2003, before the novel had...

Monster is a young-adult drama novel written by Walter Dean Myers. Myers, who spent most of his life in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, drew from his personal and proximal experiences to portray the story of Steve Harmon, an...

Star Wars: A New Hope is the first film to be made in what would become the gigantic Star Wars franchise. Conceived by creator George Lucas as a "space opera," the film instantly became a phenomenon at the moment of its release. It paved the way...

First published in Spanish in 1931, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (English title: Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) is a nivola by Miguel de Unamuno. The nivola is a literary genre of Unamuno’s own design, longer than a short story but shorter than a...

The Crossover is a novel in verse about brotherhood and basketball. Its author, Kwame Alexander, aims to reach a wide variety of readers, including reluctant ones, through sports stories that are really about family, love, and friendship.

The...

Montana 1948 was written in Wisconsin and published in 1993 by Larry Watson as the follow-up to his doctoral thesis-turned-first novel In a Dark Time. The setting within Montana is the fictional town of Bentrock just—as the title indicates—a few...

Richard Wagamese published Indian Horse in 2012. A prolific and acclaimed author, Wagamese's Indian Horse is widely considered to be his best work.

The novel is narrated by Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway youth who is forced into residential schools...

Marriage à la Mode is widely regarded as John Dryden's most famous play. It was first performed in London by the King's Company in 1673, and centers around two different plots that entangle in a tragicomic web of mistaken identity, romantic...

“The Union Buries Its Dead” is a story written by Henry Lawson, an Australian writer and poet. It takes place in Bourke, a small town in rural New South Wales, and narrates the burial of a union laborer, who drowned in a river. Lawson wrote “The...

Looking for Alibrandi was written in 1992 by Melina Marchetta, and was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. It was Marchetta’s first book, and its first print sold out within two months of its release. The novel won the Children's Book...

Breathless is the less-than-perfect translation of the French title of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1960 explosion into the world of international cinema: À Bout de Souffle. Along with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was released a little under a...

An Artist of the Floating World is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1986. Ishiguro is a prolific and well-known novelist, famous for his books The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He has won the Man Booker Prize and...

“The Case for Reparations” is an essay written about the history and possibility of reparations for slavery in the United States, particularly through the lens of the housing crisis, with Chicago used as a specific example for how the histories of...

Pleasantville is director and writer Gary Ross' 1998 film that follows two teenagers from the 1990s as they embark on a supernatural journey into the world of a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950s called Pleasantville. It looks at the...

The Village by the Sea is a novel written by Anita Desai and published in 1982. The novel focuses on a small family in India who lives in a village near the sea. The family is in a difficult situation because the mother is extremely sick and the...

We think of autumn as a time of relaxation and celebration: the year winds down, the air grows cooler, and summer's greenery fades to a vibrant display of rust and gold. We speak of the season's beauty, and often mourn its passing. But we may not...

Troilus and Criseyde is a romance story set in Ancient Greece and written by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1382-1386. It is broken up into 5 books which chart the rise and fall of the characters' love affair. Troilus and Criseyde begins during the...

There There is Tommie Orange’s debut novel, published in 2018 and hailed as a stunning contribution to a new generation of contemporary indigenous writing in North America. This new wave of writers is marked by their experiments with form and a...