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In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.

For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a...

Published in 1939, as Britain was entering a period of great austerity due to the declaration of war against Germany, Party Going might at first seem like a wholly tone-deaf novel for its time, largely because it deals with a group of wealthy...

The story of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (originally published in 1952) is an interesting one to say the least. Highsmith originally published the book under the name Claire Morgan because she feared becoming "a lesbian book writer" and...

It is strange that there are very few mentions of Athenagoras' writings by other early Christian apologists, because he was well-known, and was also considered influential amongst both his peers and early Christians alike. He was respected for the...

Graham Greene's A Gun for Sale (1936) is not one of Greene's best novels, but it is perhaps one of his most important. It set the stage for what was to come in his ultra-famous novel Brighton Rock, which tells the story of, as the title and some...

It's very likely that few people today who are not serious literary scholars have ever heard of Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh's excellent satirical novel mocking the rich and decadent society of London after World War I (published in 1930). However,...

Richard Wagamese published Indian Horse in 2012. A prolific and acclaimed author, Wagamese's Indian Horse is widely considered to be his best work.

The novel is narrated by Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway youth who is forced into residential schools...

Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is a collection of short stories by Sui Sin Far (who published the collection under the name pen name Edith Maude Eaton). Although not incredibly popular, the collection was incredibly important because it marked the...

Marriage à la Mode is widely regarded as John Dryden's most famous play. It was first performed in London by the King's Company in 1673, and centers around two different plots that entangle in a tragicomic web of mistaken identity, romantic...

“The Union Buries Its Dead” is a story written by Henry Lawson, an Australian writer and poet. It takes place in Bourke, a small town in rural New South Wales, and narrates the burial of a union laborer, who drowned in a river. Lawson wrote “The...

Looking for Alibrandi was written in 1992 by Melina Marchetta, and was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. It was Marchetta’s first book, and its first print sold out within two months of its release. The novel won the Children's Book...

Breathless is the less-than-perfect translation of the French title of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1960 explosion into the world of international cinema: À Bout de Souffle. Along with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was released a little under a...

If given the opportunity to name one of the best films ever made, many would justifiably cite Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965) as their favorite. Adapted from the 1959 stage play of the same name, the film tells the true story of the Von...

When Grease was released in the summer of 1978, few people would have predicted that it would become one of the movie industry's biggest cult hits of all time; nor would they have imagined that generations yet unborn would know the movie's lyrics...

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (released in 1991 and called T2 for short) is one of the few cases in film history where a sequel is considered better than the original film (in this case, 1984's The Terminator). Directed and co-written once again by...

Guy de Maupassant is one of the most popular writers of the second half of the 19th century. He is the author of six novels, 260 short stories, essays, articles, poems and plays. In 1880 with the publication of “Boule de Suif” Maupassant appeared...

An Artist of the Floating World is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1986. Ishiguro is a prolific and well-known novelist, famous for his books The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He has won the Man Booker Prize and...

Cereus Blooms at Night was written by Trinidadian filmmaker/artist/writer Shani Mootoo. The book tells the story of an older lady named Mala Ramchandin through the eyes -- and mouth -- of a lively and energetic nurse named Tyler. Set in the...

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was adapted for the big screen in 1975 from the German language novel of the same name by Heinrich Boll, one of Germany's foremost post-War writers, and the recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The...

Grain is a collection of poem written by John Glenday and published in 2009. Glenday's poetry style is quite lyrical, and he infuses many emotions into his writing. Some of the most interesting poems within Grain include a rendering of the popular...

First published in 1990, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment explores the intersectionality of race, gender, and class within the framework of black feminist theory. Written by sociologist and scholar...

“The Case for Reparations” is an essay written about the history and possibility of reparations for slavery in the United States, particularly through the lens of the housing crisis, with Chicago used as a specific example for how the histories of...

Pleasantville is director and writer Gary Ross' 1998 film that follows two teenagers from the 1990s as they embark on a supernatural journey into the world of a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950s called Pleasantville. It looks at the...

Based on Jordan Belfort's book of the same name, Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) tells the story of Belfort's (as portrayed by Leonardo Dicaprio) career as a stockbroker and his time at his own firm, Stratton Oakmont, where he and...