What could be a worse fate for a modern American female poet than to be lumped into a nebulous, chauvinistic and ever slightly misogynistic pool of cess stereotyped as a “domestic poet.” Anyone unfamiliar with the term coming across it from the...

The knock against Marge Piercy’s poems—despite the plethora of work produced by this most prolific of American writers—has always been that she is too willing to sacrifice artistry for polemics. While true that Piercy is a staunchly feminist...

Shadows on the Rock is a 1931 novel by Willa Cather. The “rock” of the title is Quebec City which becomes the setting for a tale of some of the earliest French settlers in the New World. The novel really does not have much of a plot per se and...

Anil's Ghost is the fourth novel written by the Sri-Lankan born Canadian author Michael Ondaatje; it was published in English by McClelland & Stewart Publishers on March 30, 2000. The title was not pulled out of the blue. Anil's Ghost could be...

Patrick D. Smith (1927-2014) writes predominantly historical fiction. Hailing from Florida, his writing tends to focus upon the American south and America's frontier days. He attended college at the University of Mississippi before pursuing his...

Top Girls is one of Caryl Churchill’s most well known plays. It premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London on August 28, 1982, and won the Obie Award for Best Play of the Year. In its first run at the Royal Court, the cast included Gwen Taylor...

Delillo was already a well-accomplished author some time before his '97 release, Underworld. Having already won many awardsincludinga Pulitzer Prize and a Gugenheim fellowship, Delillo had already risen in the ranks garnering comparison to Thomas...

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, is an erotic novel written by John Cleland and was first published in 1748. The novel is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form...

Though The Beggar's Opera has earned a reputation for its ironically rambunctious exploration of amoral characters, crime syndicates, and overt sexuality, John Gay originally intended it primarily as a political statement, a comment on both the...

Citizen Kane has widely been praised as the greatest film ever made, particularly for its innovative narrative structure, its cinematography, editing, and Orson Welles' tour de force performance. Pauline Kael called it "the one American talking...

John Marsden is a teacher and novelist born on September 27, 1950 in Victoria, Australia. As a teenager, he was often times alienated and bullied by his classmates, which took its toll by the time he reached college. After graduating from high...

The House of Blue Leaves is play written by John Guare which premiered February 10, 1971, at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in New York and proceeded to enjoy and initial off-Broadway run of 337 performances. The play was the first in a series of...

Flight was written by Sherman Alexie and published in 2007 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Press. A magical realist novel, it tells the story of a troubled Native American teen who has reached his breaking point after years of abuse at the hands...

The Good Earth was published in 1931. It was an immediate hit and has remained Buck's most well-known text. The novel has been translated into more than thirty different languages. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1932. The Good Earth...