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Published in 1972, My Name is Asher Lev is Chaim Potok’s third novel. Like his best-selling debut The Chosen, the story creates drama from the conflict between Orthodox and secular Judaism. Set predominantly in the Crown Heights section of...

All things considered, it is nothing less than astonishing that most people are not familiar with Eliza Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. Even those who never read a book have at least heard of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Those...

Libra is a 1988 work of speculative fiction by Don DeLillo which tells the story of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The work began as a piece of straightforward non-fiction by DeLillo published five years earlier in Rolling...

The Lady from Shanghai may be the only film noir in made expressly in order to pay back a personal loan. That loan was made to Orson Welles by Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn under terms in which payback would include a movie directed by Welles....

According to the author himself, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was just 16 years old when he witnessed an encounter between an 11-year-old prostitute and her grandmother. Many decades later that prostitute would age by a few years and become the...

Hunger of Memory or Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez is a non-fiction account written by the American author Richard Rodriguez in the year 1982. The book is considered autobiographical one and it follows the writer as he tries...

One fateful night Lydia Maria Child read an article published in a literary magazine by John Palfrey. The Unitarian leader chastised American writers for making no significant contribution to world literature as an exemplar of uniquely American...

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is a comedic fantasy novel spanning thousands of years, written as a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The two authors were living in England at the time and...

In 1900, Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia into the upper class and important Mitchell family. An important part of life in Atlanta, the civil war was a recent history that Mitchell would have heard much about. Gone with the Wind was...

F for Fake holds the somewhat dubious distinction of being the last completed project directed by Orson Welles. In fact, the project was stimulated as a response to a debt the renowned film director owed to the Internet Revenue Service and much of...

The Five Dialogues by Plato (namely, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo) present Plato’s philosophy vis-à-vis his mentor Socrates. These dialogues can be read as a narration of Socrates’ life and are akin to acts in a drama or chapters of...

There are more than three kinds of people in this world, but for the sake simplicity and thematic coherence, let’s break everyone down as belonging to four separate and distinct categories. First you have those people who loved The English Patient...

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical text by David Hume. It was written from 1750 to 1776, after which Hume died before he could publish the work. Originally published in 1779, it has since been republished in 1998 by Hackett...

The Chosen Place, the Timeless People was written by Paule Marshall, a talented novelist and professor of literature. This striking novel was published during 1984 by Vintage.

This text highlights the rocky relationship that develops between two...

MacArthur fellowship winner Paule Marshall was an internationally acclaimed American writer. She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. Paule's father was a migrant of the Caribbean island of Barbados. Marshall was still a kid when her father...

The Political Writings is a book written by Alfarabi and was published in 2001 by Cornell University Press. This volume consists of four of Alfarabi's most significant texts that focus on classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and...

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial...

First Confession is a fiction novel by American author Montserrat Fontes. It was first published in 1991 by Norton and tells the coming-of-age story of a nine year old girl with both Mexican and American blood, Andrea. In the novel, Fontes...

Mother Courage and Her Children is set during the Thirty Years' War, but it was written either shortly before or during the early years of the Second World War. Hitler's warmongering intentions had become clear to many Germans by the mid-1930s,...

During the incredibly successful run of The Glass Menagerie, theater workmen taught Williams how to play poker. Williams was already beginning to work on a new story, about two Southern belles in a small apartment with a rough crowd of blue-collar...

In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two...

The Piano Lesson is the fourth play in August Wilson's Pittsburgh cycle, and one of the most renowned. If the entire ten play cycle can be seen as a living history lesson, then The Piano Lesson is the pop quiz, smashing together the legacies of...

Rip Van Winkle and other stories first appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published serially in the United States from 1819-1820, and in book form in England in 1820. The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon was extremely...

The history of Yonnondio is as interesting as the book itself. It is an unfinished novel. Tillie Olsen wrote the majority of it when she was nineteen years old. Indeed, she estimates that she began the novel in March 1932, the same month she...