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Girl with a Pearl Earring is a 1999 historical novel by Tracy Chevalier. The novel is inspired by the famous painting of the same name, which was painted by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The precise date of the painting is unknown, but it is...

Citizen: An American Lyric was published in 2014 by American poet Claudia Rankine, and remains a timely, even urgent meditation on race, violence, racism, art, and mediation. The book has been described as both criticism and poetry; critic Michael...

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a national best-seller and a global phenomenon. Chronicling Nafisi's time as a female professor of Western Literature at the University of Tehran in the 1970s, her expulsion from the...

The Lion and the Jewel is one of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s most famous works. While it is a light and amusing comedy, it is also renowned for its complex themes and allegorical structure; it is also notable for its insights into Yoruba...

Dead Poets Society is a 1989 movie starring Robin Williams and directed by Peter Weir. It is set in the ultra-conservative and highly prestigious Welton Academy, an aristocratic public school in the Northeastern United States, and tells the story...

C.S. Lewis is an author of children’s literature. He is most widely known for The Chronicles of Narnia series; he also has written scholarly books and fictional works about Christianity. The Chronicles of Narnia series consists of seven books in...

The Second Sex was published in 1949, at a time when feminism was not yet widely discussed as a pressing social issue. It is widely considered to be a formative text of second-wave feminism. This strain of feminism shifted focus from gaining...

The biggest grossing movie released in June 1974 was Chinatown. That very dark update of film noir featuring one of the most intricate plots in Hollywood grossed 23 million dollars, which was a good 12 million dollars less than the biggest...

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...

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...

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...