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The key to Nick Hornby's success as a novelist in his home country of Great Britain is the fact that he presents himself as an "ordinary bloke" and not, per se, an academic, or a writer-type, on in fact anybody but a fanatical soccer fan who got...

David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014) is based on the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the films screenplay). The film chronicles the story of Amy (played masterfully by Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (played by Ben Affleck) after...

Francois Begaudeau published his book Entre Les Murs in 2006; part autobiography, part fiction, it tells the story of the experiences of a literature teacher in a difficult junior high school in Paris' multi-cultural and often troubled inner city....

Controversial intellectual Christopher Hitchens called The Child In Time Ian McEwan's literary masterpiece. Like the majority of McEwan's work, it is both sombre and melancholy at its heart, and tells the story of children's book author Stephen...

A Treatise is a work of philosophy by George Berkeley, an Irish Empiricist. The work was published in 1710, and was an addition as well as refute to the philosophy of John Locke. In it, Berkeley argues that the outside world (the material world)...

"The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" is a literary buy-one-get-one as it combines two volumes, "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" and "Further Adventures of Nils". This is a style of writing popularized by early twentieth century children's author...

If you have never watched classic film noir "Black Narcissus" before, you could be forgiven for thinking, based on the title alone, that it is a psychological murder mystery about a serial killer whose nickname inspires the title of the movie. In...

Sarah Grand, born as Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in 1854 in Ireland, was a feminist writer and activist of English descent. Grand found little comfort or intellectual nourishment in the educational opportunities available to young women of...

By his contemporaries, George Barker was often described as a peculiar writer, who cannot be put into any specific box. His autobiography, written by Robert Fraser is fittingly called "The Chameleon Poet". While he is often associated with the...

The Cartographer is a highly themed book of poetry written by Kei Miller and published in 2014. The book follows the story of a cartographer (one who makes maps) that tries to find a religious city by mapping his way to it. As a Rastaman (a member...

Written on the Body is a fictional romance novel published in 1994 and written by Jeanette Winterson. An incredibly notable feat of the novel is that the narrator, who is in love with another character in the novel, never has their gender or...

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford was originally published in eight irregular installments of the magazine Household Words from 1851 to 1853 (the magazine was edited at the time by famed author Charles Dickens). Finally, it was published as a complete...

Collected during the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th to 14th century CE, One Thousand and One Nights is a book of short stories. Better known to most English speakers as Arabian Nights, A Retelling is the same collection, but translated to modern...

Kiese Laymon generally writes essays and articles for sites like ESPN, Gawker, and the New York Times. Prior to the release of Heavy: An American Memoir in 2018, he'd only written two books, both of which released in 2013: a novel called Long...

First published in 1974, "Freedom and Resentment" and Other Essays is a collection of essays by British philosopher Sir Peter Frederick Strawson, commonly known as P.F. Strawson. Strawson "was a leading member of the ordinary language school of...

Miracle on 34th Street is a Christmas classic film directed by George Seaton who also wrote the screenplay based on the story by Valentine Davies. The picture was released in 1947 and was produced by William Perlberg with a budget of $630,000. It...

The Muppet Christmas Carol was released in 1992. It was directed by Brian Henson and based off of Charles Dickens' classic novel "A Christmas Carol", with a screenplay written by Jerry Juhl. Martin G. Baker along with Henson produced the film...

Scrooge was released in 1951 and was directed by Brian Desmond Hurst with a screenplay by Noel Langley which was based off of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. It stars Alastair Sim as the titular character, Mervy Johns, Hermione Baddely,...

Home Alone is a 1990 Christmas comedy film directed by Chris Columbus starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. It follows the eight year old Kevin McCallister after he is accidentally left behind by his family during their vacation....

The Short Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson, better known as Skin Folk, is a 2001 collection of short stories by Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson's stories draw mostly from the science fiction and fantasy genres and feature aspects...

Survivors Club is a non-fiction book by Michael and Debbie Bornstein. Michael, the child in color on the front photograph of the book, was able to survive a horrible life at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. In this book, Michael details the...

In 1932, a German woman by the name of Margaret Schwartzkopf, was the guest of Mary Elizabeth Frye, in Baltimore. She was worried about her mother back in Germany, who was ill, but she was unable to go home to see her because of the increasingly...

Lydia Davis is an American writer and translator. Davis was born in 1947 and grew up in a very intellectual environment as the daughter of Hope Hale Davis, an American feminist and writer and Robert Gorham David, a university professor. She has...

Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (first published in 1959) tells the story of the eponymous Duddy Kravitz, a smart, sassy, and scheming hustler who spends most of his day going to school at a local Jewish academy and working...