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The Little White Bird is a novel by British author J.M. Barrie which spans fantasy and whimsy to social commentary with dark, aggressive undertones. The book reached prominence and longevity primarily due to the introduction of a character called...

An Australian-born poet who lived much of his life in Great Britain, Peter Porter stands among the greats in the pantheon of 20th and 21st century Australian literature. Enviably intellectual, Porter's interests ranged from history to philosophy...

While Edith Wharton is primarily known for her novels about turn-of-the-century New York high society, she also wrote dozens of short stories that are just as astute and lyrical. In these brief pieces of fiction, Wharton contemplates the tension...

Juan Rulfo's The Burning Plain and other Short Stories (originally En llano en llamas) was published in 1953. It marked the first of Rulfo's two publications, the other being his highly regarded novel, Pedro Páramo (1955). These two works, though...

Murder, My Sweet is a 1944 film noir directed by Edward Dmytryk. It was based on Raymond Chandler's 1949 novel "Farewell My Lovely" and was released in the United Kingdom with this title but although the film was first screened in Minneapolis as...

Pickup on South Street is an unexpectedly dense thriller that commences with a pickpocketing theft and appears as though it will be little more than a standard film noir. By the time it comes to a conclusion, you will realize that you have just...

The Piano is a 1993 drama film written and directed by Jane Campion and starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin. The story, which takes place in New Zealand, focuses around a mute piano player and her daughter.

The two...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seelen Auf) is arguably Fassbinder's best-known film. The 1974 film follows the doomed May-December romance between Emmi, a widowed woman in her sixties, and Ali, a young Moroccan immigrant. As a loose remake...

Head-On is a 2004 film by German filmmakers Fatih Akin, who is of Turkish descent. The film centers on Sibel and Cahit, and Sibel's threatening to take her life in order to get Cahit to marry her so that she can live out her dream life which...

Asa Earl Carter was a controversial and enigmatic figure. He is known for his links with the Ku Klux Klan. He later found solace in writing, however, critics as well as readers found it difficult to separate his success from his white supremacist...

Farewell to Mazanar, Jeanne Houston’s 1973 memoir, opens with a haunting image of the 7-year-old Jeanne watching her father’s sardine fishing boat sail off into the waters off Long Beach, California. On this day, however, the boat did something it...

Spies is a psychological novel written by novelist and playwright Micheal Frayn. It was published in 2002 and received the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, the 2002 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best...

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen took home the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000: pretty heady company for a really heady play about quantum physics pitting Niels Bohr against Werner Heisenberg. (That’s Werner Heisenberg…not Walter White’s Heisenberg.)...

Michael Frayn’s frenetic audience-pleasing farce Noises Off began life as a one-act play with the title Exits first performed in 1977 at Drury Lane. The success of that performance led to the commission for the play to be expanded into a...

Arranged Marriage is a collection of eleven short stories written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni who is an Indian-American author and poet. This book was published in 1995 and won the American Book Award. It was on the San Francisco Chronicle...

Published in 1961, Sunlight on a Broken Column is a semi-autobiographical work and the only complete novel by Attia Hosain. The novel, set against the backdrop of the Partition of India and the social fragmentation it ushered in, follows the life...

The Mexican-American author Ana Castillo was born in Chicago in 1953. Considered a pioneer in the field of Chicana studies and Chicana literature, 'So Far From God' is her ninth published work, coming after the likes of 'Peel My Love Like an...

The Children's Book was written by A. S. Byatt, an award-winning author who has accrued international fame for her novels and short stories. This historical fiction novel was originally published during 2009 and was later published during 2010 by...

Martin Louis Amis is a contemporary British novelist. Having been inspired by the likes of James Joyce, Amis often deals with the follies of Western capitalist society. His narratives frequently poke fun at such lifestyles in exaggerated form.

One...

Ezra Pound's contribution to poetry is marked by his promotion of Imagism, a movement centered on clarity, economic language, and rhythm. Pound started this movement after studying Japanese forms of poetry like waka verse and haiku. These forms...

Although Kipling is perhaps most famous for his short stories like "The Jungle Book," he was just as famed for his verse as his prose. His work, which is staggering in number, consists of such major poems as "If", "The White Man's Burden", "The...

One of the most famous - and infamous - works in the history of literature, The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe's first work of narrative art, published in 1774. The novel was perfectly timed, capturing the European imagination with its...

Last Sacrificeis the spell-binding conclusion to the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead, and was published in 2010. The world that Mead has conceived revolves around a battle between the 'good vampires', otherwise known as Moroi, and 'bad...

Spirit Boundis the fifth installment in the Vampire Academy series and was published in 2010. The world that Mead has conceived revolves around a battle between the 'good vampires', otherwise known as Moroi, and 'bad vampires', known as Strigoi....