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Fifth Business is a novel by the famed Canadian author, playwright and professor Robertson Davies. Published in 1970, it is the first work in his Deptford Trilogy.

The novel follows the life of its narrator and protagonist, Dunstan Ramsey, and...

John and Elizabeth Sherrill, two American Christian authors, first heard about Corrie ten Boom while writing another book, “God’s Smugglers.” The subject of the biography, Brother Andrew, had travelled with Corrie during mission trips to Vietnam....

Dandelion Wine is a novel first published in 1957 by Ray Bradbury, an American writer famous for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Throughout his long career he was awarded many prizes, including the 2004 National Medal of...

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times tells the story of Chaplin's iconic Little Tramp as he struggles to survive in a newly modernized world. The Tramp starts out working at a factory on an assembly line, but the new technology and oppressive...

A Marvel superhero movie produced and distributed by Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Black Panther was written and directed by Ryan Coogler. The film, released on February 16, 2018, was an instant hit with viewers, raking in over a billion dollars at...

In the post-9/11 media landscape, Crash’s backstory has garnered nearly as much attention as the plot itself. After personally experiencing a carjacking in 1991, television writer Paul Haggis was inspired to pen this story about social and racial...

In the 1940s and 50s, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as "The Archers," wrote, directed, and produced a litany of films that are now considered classics. Contrary to the typical Hollywood studio arrangement at the time,...

Wu Ch’eng-en, a Confucian scholar and well-respected literary poet, wrote Monkey during the Ming dynasty. This makes it all the more surprising that Monkey was written in the vernacular -- plain, simple language -- during a time period that...

The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in...

Published in 1988, A Small Place is a novel by Jamaica Kincaid. It is set in Antigua, the island where she was born and raised before she came to the United States at her mother's wish. The book was critically well-received, although also mildly...

Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie" in the original German) is a cornerstone of existentialist writing which centers on themes of religion, colonialism, and torture. It is notable for its flat, unaffected tone, with a...

Democracy in America, is a firsthand sociopolitical observation of the United States written by French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. The author documents his travels through America and contrasts his experiences with established...

What if the Allies hadn't won the Second World War? What if the conquering Japanese and German armies divided up the United States?

In The Man in the High Castle, Dick explores the chain of events that would cause such a state of affairs, and what...

The Lightning Thief is a fantasy-adventure novel by Rick Riordan. It is the first of five novels in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. It is followed by The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last...

Lady Audley's Secret was first published in serial form, meaning it appeared in short installments at regular intervals rather than all at once. This method of publishing, which was common in the Victorian period, suited works that were dramatic...

Crossed, the second book of Ally Condie's Matched trilogy, is a young adult, dystopian, romance novel featuring Cassia Reyes and Ky Markham as protagonists. The book details Cassia and Ky's fight to reunite after forced estrangement at the hands...

Kindred is science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s most famous work. A genre-bending novel, it includes explorations time travel, antebellum slavery, and feminism, told in gripping and immediate prose. It has been referred to as a work of...

Go Set a Watchman is Harper Lee's second published novel, after her award-winning To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Although there are some striking differences between Lee's two novels in terms of style and content, the continuity...

Published in 1995, Krik? Krak! is a collection of 9 short stories written by Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. Though they have differing topics and central characters, the stories are linked together because of one central concept: the...

Let the Circle be Unbroken is one of Mildred Taylor’s most famous books for young readers, and a cherished work of African American fiction. It is a sequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, which was published in 1976.

Let the Circle was published...

Dombey and Son was initially published as "Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation." The novel is typically seen as marking a transition in Dickens's career. His seventh novel, it is notable for showing...

Published in 2011 to immense acclaim, The Tiger's Wife earned Tea Obreht forms of recognition that few writers will see in their lifetimes--let alone at the age of 25. Yet Obreht was exactly that old when her politically conscious, symbolically...

Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is a classic of Black feminist science fiction. Characterized by classic sci-fi conventions such as a post-apocalyptic earth, a character with strange psionic powers, and a belief that it is the destiny of...

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed letter to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to be a black person in America. It spans the personal, such as growing up in Baltimore and his cultivation of an intellectual and...