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Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the 2007 debut collection by British-Punjabi Sikh poet Daljit Nagra. The collection's title is an allusion to three influential works: W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and...

Office Space was written and directed by Mike Judge who also created Beavis and Butt-Head and Silicon Valley. The film premiered in 1999 and was released by 20th Century Fox. Though it was not a major success finanically at the box office, the...

Though published and widely known as The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt's work was originally conceived under the name The Burden of Our Time. This alternate title reveals the purpose of the work: to interrogate the terrible burden...

The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff was published in 1996. It has a complicated plot that involves many certain instances that ultimately intertwine together. A man is shot, another man is fired for writing an untrue obituary, a man loses his...

There remains some discrepancy as to when Yusef Komunyakaa was born. Some documents suggests it was 1941, while others list 1947. It is known with certainty that he was raised in Louisiana with a family of Trinidadian descent. Living in the...

Based on the actual life of Reliance Industries co-founder Dhirubhai Ambani, Guru is a Indian drama film directed by Mani Ratnam and starring Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 in the World Cinema...

The Invention of Morel is a 1940 book by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Winning the 1941 First Municipal Prize for the City of Buenos Aires, the novel was very well received upon publication and instantly became a classic. The Invention of Morel was the...

A Child Called “It,” published in 1995, was Dave Pelzer's first book. It is a nonfiction memoir, telling the story of his abuse as a child from the ages of 4 to 12 at the hands of his mother. It follows his childhood until a teacher at school at...

In 1957, mystery novelist Robert Bloch was inspired to write Psycho after studying the grisly details of the crimes committed by serial killer Ed Gein, who notoriously slaughtered nearly 40 women over 10 years. Simon and Schuster published Bloch's...

A Grain of Wheat is considered one of Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s greatest literacy achievements. The title derives from 1 Corinthians 15:36: "How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies"; the verse John 12:24 also...

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is a book by American writer Nathaniel Philbrick about the loss of the whaleship Essex in the Pacific Ocean in 1820. The book was published by Viking Press on May 8, 2000, and won the...

Flying Home and Other Stories is a collection of stories by prominent American author Ralph Waldo Ellison (most notable for his National Book Award-winning novel Invisible Man). The stories in this compilation were published between 1937 and 1954,...

Not much is known of English writer Thomas Heywood’s early life. It is believed that he was born in 1575 in Lincolnshire. He attended the University of Cambridge to study English. After graduating from college, he worked as an actor and wrote...

Paradise was published in 1997, the seventh of Morrison’s novels and her first after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. It completes a trilogy that begins with Beloved and follows with Jazz, each probing themes of memory, violence,...

Maniac Magee is the sixth book written by American children's author Jerry Spinelli. Due to its careful, bittersweet rendering of racism in 1980s and 1990s in the United States, the book, published in 1990, won an incredible number of awards...

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, published in 2011, is the first YA novel published by author Ransom Riggs. The story's premise of a boy using photos to investigate the mystery surrounding his grandfather's death echoes the author's...

On Beauty was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that September, and won Zadie Smith the Orange Prize for Fiction (now called the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2006. The book follows a hysterical realistic style...

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of seven volumes of Maya Angelou's autobiography, which cover the years from the early 1930's, up until about 1970. Out of the seven, it is probably the most popular and critically acclaimed volume,...

Salvage the Bones is Jesmyn Ward’s second novel and the recipient of the 2011 National Book Award.

Deeply in dialogue with the Southern Gothic genre, Ward's narrative functions as a gritty yet dreamy first-person account of Hurricane Katrina's...

The story of two children who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the "Met"), From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is one of the most beloved young adult novels of all time.

Inspiration for the novel came from numerous...

Freakonomics is the first book by economist Steven D. Levitt, co-authored with Stephen J. Dubner. It was published in 2005 by William Morrow. Stringing together numerous stories, anecdotes, and data analyses of unusual phenomena, Freakonomics ...

“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Sexual Politics” is Gayle Rubin’s germinal statement about the politics and history of sex in the United States. It was published in 1984, two years after Rubin had given a famous “pro-sex” statement at...

Gattaca, released in 1997, is a multi-generic film that incorporates elements of Science Fiction, Dystopic Fiction and Crime Fiction. The film was directed and written by Andrew Niccol, a screenwriter and director who made Gattaca, Simone, Lord of...

Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is a canonical statement on the principles and foundations of literary criticism. It is widely noted for its scope and ambition, synthesizing theory from Aristotle to the present, critiquing the state of the...