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The speed of Wendelin Van Draanen's prose is extremely quick, and mirrors the speed around the track of her protagonist, sixteen year old Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star who loses a leg when her track team's bus collides with a car...

In 1862, during his Presidency, Abraham Lincoln's beloved son, Willie, passed away, and was interred in the crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. The President was consumed by grief, and had been known to go into the...

Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a book collection of 15 poems. The book and thus the poems were written between the years 1914 and 1919, before it was published in 1920. Later on, the book has been republished various times, including the...

First published in 1981, Mulberry and Peach is a historical fiction novel by Chinese writer Hualing Nieh. The novel is "set against the background of the Japanese occupation of China, the Communist-Nationalist struggle, the White Terror of Taiwan,...

Bound Feet and Western Dress is a memoir written by Pang-Mei Chang about her aunt, Chang Yu-i. Both of these characters are women, and Chang writes about the hardships of being a woman in China today and during the time of her aunt. One of those...

Bernard Malamud likely was best known for his novel The Natural before the Robert Redford film adaptation hit movie screens. Since then, The Natural is almost certainly the author’s most famous work of fiction. Despite the fact that his...

Nadja is a French novel written by the French author named André Breton. It is written in a genre called “surrealist narration” and is often pictured as the leading catalyst novel in the surrealist movement in France. The book was first published...

Released in 2004, Gail Jones' Sixty Lights tells the story of a woman named Lucy Strange. In the novel, she is growing up in Victorian Australia and England and is fascinated by new photographic technology, which she uses to take beautiful...

Chocolat is a cinematically renowned drama, based on the book of the same name by Joanne Harris. The movie was releases on December 15, 2000, by Miramax films, and was directed by Lasse Hallström. The movie tells the story of Vianne Rocher, and...

Primo Levi's first books about his experiences through the Holocaust were autobiographical and subjective; in this, his last book, he tries to take a more analytical approach and the book is written in the style of a philosophy treatise or...

"The Trial of an Ox for Killing a Man" is a chap book from the early 1830s. Chap books were cheaply printed, crudely decorated short booklets that were sold on the street to provide some easy reading for the everyday man. This specific book was...

Published in 2019, On the Come Up is a fictional teenage poverty novel that explores the life of an aspiring rapper who lives in a poor neighborhood and is perceived as a hoodlum by most of the people she knows. Her father, who was also a rapper,...

What is the difference between a political book and a political manifesto? Answer: absolutely nothing. This becomes abundantly evident in Bernie Sanders' book "Where We Go From Here" which reads more like a biography of a future presidential...

Shortest Way Home is a narrative by Pete Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend Indiana. The book, published in February 2019, details Buttigieg's views of what politics should be, which sharply contrast the controversial topics discussed in...

Published in 2014, The Sixth Extinction is a non-fiction book chronicling how humans have drastically changed the environment in which we live. With the combination of pollution and deforestation, we have destroyed the lives of so many animals and...

Published in 2018, New Dark Age is a novel examining the extent to which people have lost touch with reality due to the widespread introduction of technology. Bridle argues that most people believe knowledge of the world comes from a vast...

Depending upon whether you are reading the first or second printing of this collection of essays and short stories by renowned science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, you will be entertained, enthralled and often completely nauseated by either...

The Education of Henry Adams is Henry Adams' autobiography, originally published in 1918 upon his death (though Adams wrote the book earlier). It details not only Adams' life, but the history that unfolded around him, including the presidencies of...

Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers (2018) explores the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The novel follows a man named Yale Tishman, who works at an art gallery and is on the cusp of bringing a collection of extraordinary 1920s paintings and drawings...

Daniel Ellsberg was once a nuclear war planner and presidential advisor (as the title suggests). In The Doomsday Machine, published in 2017, Ellsberg provides an in-depth look at nuclear armaments in the world and how the U.S. uses it. Ellsberg...

Published in 1992 and written by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man is a book detailing the events after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. In his book, Fukuyama claims that this marks the end...

Amy Tan is best known for her novels and children's books, but she has also written several short stories, published both formally and informally. Her most popular short story is "Fish Cheeks", which is a true story published in 1987. The story...

All Our Relations is a 2018 non-fictional book examining the effects of past genocides on indigenous youth in North America. Recent studies have indicated that one out of three deaths among young indigenous people is due to suicide, likely because...

David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) tells the story of the sex lives of four people: two men (Dan Shapiro and Bernard Litko) and two women (Deborah Soloman and Joan Webber) as they try to successfully swing. The story is profane and...