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The Smell of Apples is a semi-autobiographical novel by Mark Behr set in South Africa in the 1970s. The story is narrated by eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus. Marnus is the son of a well-respected military hero who is regarded as a future member of...

The book Black Elk Speaks was based on a series of conversations that the author, John G. Neihardt, had with an Oglala Lakota medicine man named Black Elk, that took place in the presence of Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, as he was acting as...

William Morris was in some ways the nineteenth-century equivalent of Martha Stewart, or Oprah Winfrey. He was a respected and successful poet, who was also an architect, artist, printer, and textile designers. His textiles are still used by...

Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House (first published in 1941 but achieved its fame after a re-issue in 1954) was first released to very little fanfare and received very few reviews (partly due to its availability and partly due to its subject...

Although it might sometimes seem as though children can behave like wild animals, they are not generally portrayed as such in mid-century modern to contemporary literature. In Victorian England, though, as Darwinism gripped the imagination of the...

Written by Philp Nel, Was the Cat in the Hat Black (published in 2017) asks and answers an important question: is children's literature racist? The answer, Nel says, is a resounding "yes." But examples are more subtle than one would think. In The...

America is a country which throughout its history has united geographically many nations, cultures, and generations. The problems of national identity have always been urgent in the USA, and not only in the terms of location. Along with these...

Saved is a play written by the British playwright Edward Bond, which had its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, a well-established London theatre, in 1965. Featuring what is still one of the most shocking scenes in the history of British theatre...

Out of This Furnace is technically an historical novel, but it could also be considered a memoir, or a semi-autobiographical fiction, because American novelist Thomas Bell based the plot and the characters on his own family and their experiences...

The Power is a science fiction novel written in 2016 by British writer Naomi Alderman. It is set in a matriarchal society where women have enhanced powers, one of which is the ability to harness jolts of electricity from the tips of their fingers....

Katherine Anne Porter particularly detested the word "novella", considering it an insult, at best. It was akin to calling a shovel a digging implement; Pale Horse, Pale Rider was generally classified by critics and reviewers as a novella, but...

First published in 2017, Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's second novel Pachinko received very solid reviews. Jean Zimmerman of NPR liked the book, saying that "this is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and...

Written by Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (published in 2012) tells the story of a married couple named Ki Lim and Sang Ly. They live in a city full of trash they make a living by finding recycled things and selling them. If it isn't worse...

Published in 2011 by the American novelist and screenwriter Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is a science fiction and dystopian novel. Drawing heavily from American culture in the 1980s, Ready Player One presents a near-future dystopia where an...

Manuel Puig was an Argentinian novelist and screenwriter, born as Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne in 1932 near Buenos Aires in Argentina. While still in school, Puig developed an interest in psychoanalysis and European cinema, studying English by...

"Zlateh the Goat" is a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story was included in his collection of short stories, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966). "Zlateh the Goat," like most of Singer's stories, was written in Yiddish and...

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, published in 2010 as David Mitchell's fifth novel, is a long, dense historical fiction book that marks a significant departure from his previous genre of writing. Set primarily on the island of Dejima, a...

Annie Dillard is an American writer who writes of growing up in Pittsburgh, PA in her memoir An American Childhood. She won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction at the age of 29 for her seminal work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That particular book proved...

George Herbert, born in 1593, was a busy man: he served two terms as a member of Parliament, held the post of public orator at Trinity College, was ordained as a deacon, and as canon of the Lincoln Cathedral, he worked to become a pious servant of...

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was released in 2008 to critical and financial acclaim, grossing over a billion dollars at the box office. Written by Christopher and his brother Jonathan, the film tells the story of the corruption of Gotham...

When Kobe Bryant tragically died in January of 2020, The Mamba Mentality: How I Play quickly went out of stock and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon. The Mamba Mentality was initially released in October 2018, though, and even then the book sold...

Few books are as innovative or interesting as David Almond's Kit's Wilderness (published in 2000). A children's novel, the book is set in a made-up northeast English town and tells the story of young Kit Watson and his family who move back to the...

Usually, nothing good can come of a family heirloom grandfather clock striking thirteen; Tom Long, though, finds that there is a whole new world that opens up for him when he hears the thirteenth chime. Philippa Pearce's classic children's fantasy...

First published in 1859, George Eliot's short novella The Lifted Veil tells the story of a man who is overcome by haunting visions of the future. An unhappy man, he is overwhelmed by those visions and a tremendous amount of thoughts in his head,...