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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...

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...

We now know of Cormac McCarthy as an author who produces high-quality work and sells an incredible number of books, and as a Pulitzer-prize winning author. Prior to The Crossing, though, McCarthy was a virtually unknown author whose work went...

“From 1975 to 1979 - through execution, starvation, disease and forced labour - the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population.” From Author’s Note in First They Killed My...

Fatal Attraction is a gripping and intense psychological thriller movie in 1987. It was an adaptation by James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer of a 1980 made-for-television short film also written by Dearden for the British market.

The film is directed...

Grimms Fairy Tales refers to a collection of stories released by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early to mid 1800’s. The first volume of the first edition was released in 1812. It contained 86 stories. An additional volume with 70 more stories...

Eclipse is the third installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on August 7, 2007 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

The narrative begins immediately following the events of New...

New Moonis the second installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on September 6th, 2006 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

New Moonreceived favorable critical reception, quickly...

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is Alice Walker's 1983 collection of 36 essays composed from 1966 and 1982. At the start of the collection, Walker coined the term "womanist", which refers to a black feminist or another feminist of color. The...