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Annie Dillard is an American writer born on April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her autobiography entitled An American Childhood (1987) thoroughly details her childhood during which she was heavily inspired by the creativity of her...

The Invention of Wings is a historical fiction novel written by Sue Monk Kidd. It was published on January 7, 2014. Kidd is an American author, and the author of the celebrated book The Secret Life of Bees.The novel talks about a girl called Sarah...

This disturbing chronicle of the eight-week period spanning April and May of 1945, during the Russian invasion of Berlin, was first published in 1953 and then promptly vanished, not re-surfacing again until it was re-published in Germany some...

Warren Buffett is one of those rare things; an almost impossibly successful investor with a Midas touch and an Everyman appeal that keeps him accessible and therefore inspirational to the average investor, or wannabe investor. He is an investor,...

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915. During the 1930’s he was working for the communist cause, in 1941 he became a Trappist monk in Kentucky and he published his first collection of verse, Thirty Poems, in 1944. By the time of his death in...

The Confusions of Young Torless is a fiction novel written by Robert Musil. It was first published in 1906. Robert Musil is an Austrian writer who has written several books, and one of the most important of his was The Man Without Qualities, which...

The Hoover Institution states that Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" is "the starting point for any serious study of the First World War." It not only details the events but shows the complex connections and political relationships that led...

Black Skin, White Masks is Frantz Fanon’s classic statement on the psychological experience of Black men and women in societies dominated by white people, especially France. It draws from his personal experience as a man born in the Caribbean...

When Alfred Hitchcock released Vertigo in 1958, it was met with ambivalence and near rejection by critics and audiences. Vertigo defied easy categorization and explored themes related to sexual perversity, erotic obsession and a shifting...

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is a work of historical fiction published in 1947. It is a collection of short stories written by the Polish author Tadeusz Borowski. Borowski was a writer and journalist and started working on the...

Wilkie Collins found the inspiration for The Woman in White from a French book entitled Recueil des causes célèbres. In this book, there is a story of a French widow who is drugged by her brother and then imprisoned in a mental asylum under a...

Testament of Youth is the first book in the overall memoir of Vera Brittain, an English nurse, writer, and pacifist. It covers her earlier life from 1900-1925, working as a nurse during the First World War.

In Testament of Youth, Brittain...

Written by Spanish Nobel Prize laureate Camilo Jose Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte is a novel revolving around "tremendismo", a style of writing which focuses on the characters' pain and suffering. Met with public backlash, the first few...

I Served the King of England is a 1971 novel written by Bohumil Hrabal. Written during a period of intense censorship, the book was not officially published until the 1980's. It remains an important piece of Czech literature, and was adapted into...

Morgan Spurlock set out to eat McDonald's food three times a day for 30 days. His choice in doing so is based on the increase in obesity in Americans which has spread to a level considered to now be an epidemic. Spurlock also wanted to find proof...

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy/drama film directed by Mike Nichols, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb. The story revolves around Benjamin Braddock, played in a star-making turn by a young Dustin Hoffman, who enters...

Audiences had modest expectations for Taxi Driver when it was first released in the winter of 1976. A low-budget film directed by a not-particularly-well-known Martin Scorsese and starring the young Robert De Niro, who had recently won an Oscar...

"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a philosophical poem about the creative powers of the human mind, by American modernist Wallace Stevens. It is the title poem and most famous work from Stevens' second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, published...

"Of Modern Poetry" is a poem by Wallace Stevens published in 1942, in his collection Parts of a World. The poem acts as a highly self-referential manifesto on the purpose of modern poetry, and the role of the poet.

This poem marks a noticeable...

Mac Flecknoe is one of the four major satires of esteemed English poet John Dryden. The poem is personal satire that has for its target Thomas Shadwell, another poet who had offended Dryden with his aesthetic and political leanings. It is also...

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It was directed by John Huston and was his directorial debut. The film follows the story of a San Francisco private detective named Sam Spade (played...

"Sweat" is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1926. Hurston was "a product of the Harlem Renaissance," an African-American political and artistic movement that took place in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, "as well as one of its most...

The Shack is a work of Christian fiction published by William Paul Young in 2007. The novel tells the story of Mack, a man whose daughter has been abducted by a serial killer, meeting God face to face and spending a weekend in a shack in the woods...

The Tain is actually the abbreviated title of the Irish legend of Tain Bo Cuailnge, or The Cattle Raid Of Cooley. It is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of Irish literature and it is considered an epic despite the fact that it is...