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The Other Wes Moore is both a New York Times Bestseller and a Wall Street Journal Bestseller that was published in 2011 about two men who are both named Wes Moore. The story follows the author and his life, which is the first Wes Moore. This Wes...

Written by author and activist Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma asks the race a fundamental question: what should we, as the human race, have for dinner? The answer, Michael Pollan says, is ultimately very complicated and goes far back into...

First published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie could be considered Muriel Spark's most famous novel. Spark was born and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Scotland, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her sixth novel, is set on home...

Written by famed Australian author Ruth Park, Playing Beatie Bow (originally released in 1980) tells the story of a young woman named Abigal who is incredibly distraught over her parents' separation. After an incident on the playground, Abigal...

A People's History of the United States is the sort of book that you don't see in traditional literature, because it would have been banned, burned, or outright not published. Rather than taking the more "politically correct" approach at political...

Published some time during the first century CE, Medea is a work from Ancient Roman writer Seneca. The piece is about 1000 lines long, and details the events of fictional character Medea. The reason that "Medea" doesn't exactly sound Roman is...

The last years of Yeats' life were defined by two conflicting concepts. At the one hand, he felt distain for the in his eyes failure of the democratic process in Ireland and the destruction of Irish nobility. On the other hand, he underwent a...

One of the most acclaimed modern writers, Mary Jean Chan impresses through her words and through the stories she tells in her poems. The author was born and raised in Hong Kong but eventually moved to London where she currently lives and works as...

Nowadays, in a Britain that tends to frown upon anything more patriotic than an international soccer friendly, poets such as Jessie Pope are considered outdated and jingoistic. Perhaps this is because the past really is what L.P. Hartley claimed...

Today, William Hazlitt is widely regarded as one of the greatest British essayists of all time and possibly the single most gifted writer in that field of prose of the 19th century. What makes this accomplishment all the more impressive is that...

Tea and Sympathy (1956) is based on Robert Anderson's stageplay of the same name. The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and its screenplay was written by Robert Anderson. The film tells the story of Tom Lee, a 17 year old kid who isn't...

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth." So said Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican senator from California; his words referred to World War One, the conflict around which this novel is woven.

This is the crux of the matter in Ben...

Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair...

Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938 and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to...

The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964. The heroine of the novel is Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman who is endowed with a sharp mind and a proud, unyielding temper. Hagar is having difficulty coming to terms...

In the early 1990s, women were feeling pressure like never before, specifically, pressure to do what was loosely termed (mostly by male journalists) as "have it all". In fact, a book called Having It All was published during the same year that The...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle (first published in the West in 1968 and in the USSR in 1990), tells the story of Gleb Nerzhin, a man who is a brilliant mathematician but also a prisoner. Set during three days in Moscow, In the First...

In his political allegory Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." This observation sums up the Cultural Revolution in China that took place in the 1960s; Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung,...

Published in 2010, The Hairdresser of Harare is a fictional book by Zimbabwean author Tendai Huchu. The book focuses on how Zimbabwe is in the present day, rapidly changing and expanding based upon influential western ideas. All of the book is...

An aubade is a poem traditionally set at dawn or early morning, and typically about parting lovers. This “Aubade” doesn’t involve love, however, despite its fitting setting. In the poem, which uses an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, the speaker wakes up...

The genesis of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is both incredibly unique and exceptionally fascinating. Written -- or perhaps more appropriately, dictated -- by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby after suffering a massive stroke which left...

Call Me by Your Name is a 2017 coming-of-age romance film directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the book of the same name by André Aciman. It stars Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, two young men who find themselves...

"Cat Person" is a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2017, which quickly went viral, attaining significant praise on the internet, especially within certain feminist circles.

The story is told from the point of view of Margot, a...

The Aftermath is a novel written by Welsh author Rhidian Brook and published in 2013. The book is set in Hamburg, Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The story centers around a British colonel, Lewis Morgan, who is tasked with...