It took Anita Amirrezvani five years to complete the first draft of her debut novel The Blood of Flowers. To capture the essence of the world, she traveled twice to Isfahan, the city where the story takes place. She spent countless hours...

Pnin was first released in an episodic series in the New Yorker in 1954. Written by Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), this novel is by an author known more for creepy pedophilia in his plot lines, not comedy or satire. Yet Pnin is filled with intelligent...

Daughter of Earth is an autobiographical novel published by Agnes Smedley in 1929. The story spans from the 1890’s to the 1920’s and essentially charts in semi-fictionalized form the story of Smedley’s own awakening political consciousness. A...

Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov. The book was not published in a set year, rather released in short segments of stories published from 1936 to 1951. The book mainly talks about the life of Nabokov...

Woman of Colour is a novel published in 2007 (Broadview Press) by an anonymous writer. Although the novel is fictional, it offers a unique account on the wife of a Black heiress after the slave trade was abolished in Britain. The main character in...

Eye Killers is a science fiction, paranormal novel written by Aaron Albert Carr. It was first published in 1995. A. A. Carr is a Navajo-Laguna writer and film maker. Eye Killers was his first published novel.

The story itself focuses on a thousand...

Orson Welles began making his film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello in 1948—literally began filming in that year—and the film would not be seen by the public until 1952. The story behind the financial and artistic struggle to get the...

Autobiography of a Face is a memoir by Lucy Grealy. It was first published in January 1994. Grealy was an Irish-American author and poet who won many awards for her poetry and autobiography. She died in 2002.

The memoir tells the story of Grealy...

The Long Valley, published in 1938, is the ninth volume from John Steinbeck and is a collection of 12 unrelated short stories. The book was released to positive critical reviews and robust sales for a short story collection. All but one of the...

An American Dream is a novel by Norman Mailer, first serialized in the magazine Esquire in 1965. The serialized method was previously used by famous authors such as Charles Dickens. Mailer wrote the novel based on a monthly deadline, with each...

Pariah was written and directed by Dee Rees. It was released in 2011, distributed by Focus Features and produced by Nekisa Cooper with Spike Lee being a notable executive producer on the project. The estimated budget for the project was $450,000...

The Persians is considered to be the only existing ancient Greek tragedy that was based on actual historical events. Dating back back to 472 B.C.E, The Persians is a work by one of the most famous of all figures in Greek literature, Aeschylus....

Slapboxing with Jesus is a collection of short stories that was originally published in 1999 and written by Victor LaValle. LaValle, who is an associate professor at the prestigious Columbia University, is an American author and writer. He has...

Playwright August Wilson set out to chronic\le the African-American experience throughout the 20th century by writing one play set in each of the decades. Of the cycle’s ten plays, King Hedley II is the ninth, set in 1985 and includes characters...