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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...

Devil in the Grove is a nonfiction account of a 1949 court case involving the Groveland Boys, who were accused of rape by a 17 year-old Caucasian-American. The book was published in 2012 by American writer Gilbert King. The book is set in Florida...

The Cement Garden is Ian McEwan's 1978 novel that explores complex themes of maturing, family, and dealing with loss. The novel follows Jack, the narrator, and his siblings, as they attempt to grow up without having parents. The novel is...

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the most famous spy novels ever written and one of the most influential. John le Carre published his novel just as the modestly successful James Bond series by Ian Fleming was about to become a global...

“The Fish” is an oft-anthologized and -studied work, and is usually considered one of Moore’s finest poems. It was first published in 1918 in The Egoist, then slightly revised and included in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others for 1919: An Anthology of New...

As a child, White found complete happiness during summers in the Belgrade Lakes in Maine and this love of nature, which lasted his whole life, inspired all three of his children’s books. His first, Stuart Little took White about eighteen years to...

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, a Japanese writer from the Taisho period in Japan, was considered the “Father of the Japanese short story”. He wrote a number of beautiful, concise short stories that explored diverse themes with an intricate understanding of...

T.C. Boyle—often found under his name T Coraghessan Boyle—is almost certainly known to most readers of short fiction through his short story “Greasy Lake.” That coming-of-age story that combines humor with terror without any elements of horror is...

Published in 1994, Gardening in the Tropics was the second book of poetry by Olive Senior. The book is a sequence of twelve poems that all begin with the book’s title as their opening line which sets the stage for each individual work of verse to...