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Terry Gilliam's masterwork Brazil (1985), starring Jonathon Pryce and Robert De Niro, tells the story of a low-level bureaucrat named Sam Lowry (played by Pryce) and his attempt to escape the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring...

Chains was written by Laurie Halse Anderson, a New York Times bestselling author of children's literature. This historical fiction novel was published during 2008 by Atheneum. Furthermore, it is the first installment of her Seeds of America...

The Stories of John Cheever is a 1978 collection of one of the recognized masters of the short story form. Comprising his most famous and anthologized tales, the collection was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book...

Inducted into the Chicago Hall of Fame in 2014, Margaret Walker is one of those writers whom history ought to remember, but will probably relegate to the margins. A trailblazing black poet and writer, Walker was born in Alabama in 1915, a few...

Kent Nerburn is an American novelist born on July 3, 1946 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a child, he was taught by his father, Lloyd, to always exude compassion and kindness. Lloyd worked for the American Red Cross and Nerburn cites his experiences...

Black Hole was written by Seattle-born author Charles Burns. The story takes place during the mid-1970s in suburban Seattle. A number of teenagers encounter an unusual plague that's only transmitted through sexual contact. As if that is not...

The tale told in Jack London’s 1904 adventure romance novel The Sea-Wolf actually begins three years earlier on a foggy night in San Francisco Bay. It was on the last day of November in 1901 that two ferries played starring roles in the worst...

Hari Kunzru is a British novelist born in London in 1969. After his primary education at Bancroft’s School in Essex, he attended Wadham College to study English. He later obtained a degree in Philosophy and Literature from the University of...

Herta Müller's transcendent The Land of Green Plums tells the story of four young people living in a Soviet-imposed totalitarian police state in Romania. The four have left their respective impoverished provinces in search of better opportunity in...

Charles Olson was an unconventional American poet and essayist of the twentieth century. He was born during 1910 and died during 1970. Olson was a poet who didn't conform to the "academic" composition of poetry and instead embraced a natural...

Among the writers of partition literature of the sub-continent, one of the most daring and prolific writers is Saadat Hassan Manto. He was born in a middle-class Muslim family in Ludhiana in 1912. He has narrated the first-hand experiences of the...

In 2006, Adam Shepard graduated from Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he majored in Business Management and Spanish. Having read investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in...

Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman was a novel left uncompleted at the time of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. Perhaps more famous today as the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, before her untimely death, Wollstonecraft...

One of the most famous Russian writers of all time, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821 in Russia. Dostoevsky’s literary career began with the publication of his first novel in 1846 with which he immediately rose to critical acclaim....

Born in New South Wales, Australia in 1945, Robert Gray is one of the most significant, if under-appreciated, writers to emerge from Australia in the past century. As a poet, he has explored a wide range of themes, concentrating mainly on the...

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure is a novel written by Dorothy Allison and published in 1995. Allison has written other books, including the novel Bastard Out of Carolina, which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. She has won many...

Published in 1957, Mythologies is a collection of individual essays linked by a common theme: the study of meaning that can be interpreted from signs. Highly influenced by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes’ essays seek to...

The Book of Saladin is a fictional memoir written by Tariq Ali, which was first published during 1998. It was later published again during 1999 by Verso. This book tells the story of Jerusalem's Kurdish freedom fighter named Saladin, which is...

Holocaust by Bullets is a non-fiction account of the search for the mass grave sites of the Jewish population who were executed in the Ukraine during World War Two, by mobile units of Nazi operatives. The book's author, Father Patrick Desbois, is...

Black Dog of Fate (An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past) was written by and tells the story of Peter Balakian. This book was first published during 1997 and was later published again during 1998 by Broadway. Balakian explores the unsettling...

Terrorist (2006) is a novel written by revered American author John Updike. Although Updike's novels are all set in diverse towns across America and feature an equally diverse group of characters, the common thread that stitches all of his writing...

The Tempest is a film directed by Julie Taymor and released in 2010. It is based on the play The Tempest, written by William Shakespeare, but the protagonist, Prospero, is changed from a man to a woman. (The name change from "Prospero" to...

If the most unusual movie had to picked out of every movie ever produced, the movie selected may well be Spike Jonze's quirky Being John Malkovich. The film follows a struggling puppeteer, Craig Schwartz, who discovers a portal on floor 7 of an...

John Updike won the 1964 National Book Award for his third novel, The Centaur. The strangely compelling mixture of contemporary 1947 Pennsylvania and ancient Greek mythological figures like Chiron, Prometheus, Venus and Zeus enticed some critics...