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Lucky is a memoir by prominent novelist Alice Sebold, who also wrote The Lovely Bones. The book chronicles her experience as a rape survivor and the tumultuous months that followed where she had to defend herself against her father, her peers, and...

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange things is a collection of short stories. The stories are of Japanese origin and are retold by the narrator, stories that he heard of during his time in Japan. The stories are based on Buddhist religion and...

Think of this film as the original Trainspotting, except that in this version, trains are actually spotted instead of bare arms. Closely Watched Trains became only the second film produced in Czechoslovakia to win the Academy Award for Best...

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks, premiering in 1990 and eventually receiving an Off-Broadway production in 2016. The play was praised by critics for its complexity, covering diverse...

Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West is a performance art piece written, directed, and staged by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena for their international touring art exhibition The Year of the White Bear and Two...

Abe Akira is a renowned Japanese author, known for his unique style of storytelling and his ability to weave together elements of fantasy and reality in his short stories. Born in Tokyo in 1924, Abe began writing at a young age and quickly...

The title of Jesmyn Ward’s wistful memoir about growing up in Mississippi and the men who shaped and defined that live derives from come from one of the quotes attributed to Harriet Tubman. Tubman was talking about the pain of losing the men so...

The Orkneyinga Saga is the history of the Earls of Orkney which was written anonymously by an Icelandic author. It was originally published in the 1200s but has since been translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. Joseph Anderson served as...

Henry James began writing The American while living in Paris in the winter of 1875-1876. The novel first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in twelve serialized, monthly installments from June 1876 to May 1877. In May 1877, as the serialization...

Facundo is writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s most famous work, and a fascinating example of imaginative nonfiction. It is considered one of the premier works of Latin American literature and is read and studied widely there.

While...

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani, born on July 12, 1997. She always liked education, which wasn't something the Taliban liked at her time. The Taliban forbade girls from education, but Malala advocated for girls' education rights. This led to the...

High Tide in Tucson is a compilation of 25 essays by Barbara Kingsolver, a writer and ecologist, centering around the themes of family, community, and ecology. The book was published in 1995, and praised for its well-written narrative style and...

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin first appeared in Amazing Stories magazine in 1971. The title of the book, as well as some quotes placed in the beginning of every chapter, are taken from Chuang Tzu works. Others are taken from H. G. Wells,...

The Shadowy Third and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that was published in 1923 and written by Ellen Glasgow. This is her only short story collection, as her novels receive more general attention. Glasgow was an American author who...

Sheppard Lee is a novel published in 1836 and written by Robert Montgomery Bird. Bird was an American writer, who specialized in novels and plays, as well as a physician. Bird was born to a wealthy family in Delaware and taken in by his rich...

Some academics have suggested that Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” should be regarded as the first work of American fiction which can rightly be categorized as an example of Realism. Not that it is entirely so; the caveat placed...

Burial Rites is Hannah Kent's debut novel, published in 2014, and winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award, and more. About an Icelandic woman sentenced to death after she is charged with...

“The Monument” is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop originally published in 1939 and then collected in her first book of poetry, North and South, in 1946. The poem is an example of what is known as ekphrastic verse which is just fancy literary...

An American short-story writer, novelist, editor, and poet, Howard Phillip Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was from Providence, Rhode Island. He was heavily inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Algernon Blackwood, as well as...

Mysterious Kor, written between 1941 and 1944, contains traces of Elizabeth Bowen's biography. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1899 but spent her childhood in Dublin and at Bowen Court, the family home in Cork, England. Bowen was 13 when her...

Turtle Island is Gary Snyder’s volume of thematically related verse which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974 and is considered by many the zenith of his career. After publishing half a dozen volumes that barely managed even to...

Wendy Cope is a British writer who is known primarily for her poems. Wendy Cope was born in England in 1945 and for an extended period of time she worked as a teacher. Wendy Cope began writing late in her life, having her first collection of...

The 18th century proved to be a revolutionary moment in the long history of the institution of marriage. In England, at any rate, some of the longstanding contractual and transactional conventions underwent a period of renegotiation in the public...

Howl's Moving Castle is a children's fantasy novel written in 1986 by renowned English fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of the return of the evil Witch of the Waste after fifty years of dormancy, and her threatening behavior...