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Based on the novel of same name by Winston Groom, Robert Zemeckis' 1994 film Forrest Gump tells the story of a mentally and physically challenged man in 1960s Alabama, and his various foibles and incredible luck. It chronicles Forrest's early...

“The Listeners” is the most famous and frequently anthologized poem by Walter de la Mare, an author otherwise known mostly for his horror fiction and works for children. It first appeared in print in 1912 in de la Mare’s third collection of...

Brooklyn is one of Colm Tóibín's most popular and best-known works. Published in 2009, it achieved both critical and commercial success. It was translated into 22 languages, and sold more than a quarter of a million copies. It was longlisted for...

John Ford’s The Searchers is considered to be one of the greatest American westerns of all time. Released in 1956, it is based on a novel by Alan Le May and depicts a version of the Texas-Indian wars. A commercial as well as critical success, the...

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming-of-age, young-adult novel written by Benjamin Alire Saenz and published in 2012. The story takes us back to 1987, where we meet two young Mexican-American boys residing in El...

Trumpet is a novel written by Jackie Kay in 1998. It was the first novel she wrote, and it won the 1998 Guardian Fiction Prize.

Trumpet begins with the death of Joss Moody, a highly successful jazz musician, and documents the different reactions...

Published in 1998, Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother was inspired by the death of Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl who was killed in South Africa while trying to organize the nation's first truly democratic elections. Biehl was murdered very...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel" when he was 19 years old. It was one of the very first poems of his career, and it later became one of the most influential poems of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The first version of "The Blessed...

Published in 1970, The Bluest Eye came about at a critical moment in the history of American civil rights. Morrison began Pecola's story as a short piece in 1962; it became a novel-in-progress by 1965. It was written, as one can see from the...

A 1987 novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah is considered one of the most significant postcolonial novels in recent times. This is his fifth novel and one of the prominent works to have emerged in his canon. It was...

Published in 1973, Sula is Toni Morrison’s second novel. Like her first novel, The Bluest Eye, this one also deals with the life experiences of two black girls. Yet it does not merely address the childhood experiences but follows the girls as they...

Avatar is a science-fiction movie directed and produced by James Cameron, and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was released on December 10, 2009. The film is set in the middle of the 22nd century, and follows the colonization of Pandora, a moon...

From an incredibly young age, Phillis Wheatley showed an immense precocity for the written word, and gained international acclaim for her elegy "On the Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770." Many of Wheatley's writings center around religious...

The War of the Worlds is a science-fiction classic. First released in serial form in 1897, The War of the Worlds was later released as a book in 1898 through William Heinemann of London. Though it was published after some of Wells' major works...

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a lyrical Romantic ballad written by poet John Keats. An unknown speaker begins a conversation with a lonely knight on the road, reflecting the ballad's roots in an oral tradition. Employing colloquial language, the...

Saint Joan is a play written by Bernard Shaw, premiering in 1923. In the early 1920s, Shaw was experiencing a period of professional depletion. Between 1918 and 1920, he had written a cycle of 5 interconnected plays called Back to Methuselah. When...

The Ghost Sonata (Swedish title: Spöksonaten) was written in 1907 and first performed on January 21st, 1908 at Strindberg’s Intimate Theater in Stockholm. The play was unpopular among theatrical critics of the time and only secured critical...

Brick Lane is the first novel by Monica Ali. Despite being the work of an unknown writer, the novel was hotly anticipated. She earned a book deal with a significant advance based on some preliminary chapters. In January 2003, before the novel had...

Monster is a young-adult drama novel written by Walter Dean Myers. Myers, who spent most of his life in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, drew from his personal and proximal experiences to portray the story of Steve Harmon, an...

Star Wars: A New Hope is the first film to be made in what would become the gigantic Star Wars franchise. Conceived by creator George Lucas as a "space opera," the film instantly became a phenomenon at the moment of its release. It paved the way...

First published in Spanish in 1931, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (English title: Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) is a nivola by Miguel de Unamuno. The nivola is a literary genre of Unamuno’s own design, longer than a short story but shorter than a...

The Crossover is a novel in verse about brotherhood and basketball. Its author, Kwame Alexander, aims to reach a wide variety of readers, including reluctant ones, through sports stories that are really about family, love, and friendship.

The...

Montana 1948 was written in Wisconsin and published in 1993 by Larry Watson as the follow-up to his doctoral thesis-turned-first novel In a Dark Time. The setting within Montana is the fictional town of Bentrock just—as the title indicates—a few...

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...