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The last years of Yeats' life were defined by two conflicting concepts. At the one hand, he felt distain for the in his eyes failure of the democratic process in Ireland and the destruction of Irish nobility. On the other hand, he underwent a...

One of the most acclaimed modern writers, Mary Jean Chan impresses through her words and through the stories she tells in her poems. The author was born and raised in Hong Kong but eventually moved to London where she currently lives and works as...

Nowadays, in a Britain that tends to frown upon anything more patriotic than an international soccer friendly, poets such as Jessie Pope are considered outdated and jingoistic. Perhaps this is because the past really is what L.P. Hartley claimed...

Today, William Hazlitt is widely regarded as one of the greatest British essayists of all time and possibly the single most gifted writer in that field of prose of the 19th century. What makes this accomplishment all the more impressive is that...

Tea and Sympathy (1956) is based on Robert Anderson's stageplay of the same name. The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and its screenplay was written by Robert Anderson. The film tells the story of Tom Lee, a 17 year old kid who isn't...

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth." So said Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican senator from California; his words referred to World War One, the conflict around which this novel is woven.

This is the crux of the matter in Ben...

In the early 1990s, women were feeling pressure like never before, specifically, pressure to do what was loosely termed (mostly by male journalists) as "have it all". In fact, a book called Having It All was published during the same year that The...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle (first published in the West in 1968 and in the USSR in 1990), tells the story of Gleb Nerzhin, a man who is a brilliant mathematician but also a prisoner. Set during three days in Moscow, In the First...

In his political allegory Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." This observation sums up the Cultural Revolution in China that took place in the 1960s; Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung,...

Published in 2010, The Hairdresser of Harare is a fictional book by Zimbabwean author Tendai Huchu. The book focuses on how Zimbabwe is in the present day, rapidly changing and expanding based upon influential western ideas. All of the book is...

The genesis of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is both incredibly unique and exceptionally fascinating. Written -- or perhaps more appropriately, dictated -- by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby after suffering a massive stroke which left...

The Aftermath is a novel written by Welsh author Rhidian Brook and published in 2013. The book is set in Hamburg, Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The story centers around a British colonel, Lewis Morgan, who is tasked with...

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of 17 short stories, the title being the title of the last story by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991, and published in Japan in various magazines, then...

In the 1960s, the new age of technology seemed to create a level of paranoia amongst the population that led to a generalized fear of apocalypse; it is this post-apocalyptic future that British author J.G. Ballard sets his 1962 novel The Drowned...

Down and Out in Paris and London is a memoir by famous English writer George Orwell. The memoir, although considered fictional by some critics, is actually completely true. Although the events that occur in the story did not happen to the same...

Released in 2003, Lost in Translation is a multinational film directed by Sofia Coppola. The film, which is a romantic comedy, has received many positive reviews, and stars acclaimed actor Bill Murray and renowned actress Scarlett Johansson....

The Demon Lover is a 2011 erotic fantasy novel by Juliet Dark, a pseudonym ("pen name") of award-winning American author Carol Goodman. The novel is the first installment of the Fairwick Trilogy, which centers on protagonist Callie McFay, a...

Fresh off the success of 2000's Memento, Christopher Nolan was hired by Warner Bros in 2003 to reboot the Batman property. The result was 2005's Batman Begins, which he cowrote with David S. Goyer and which starred Christian Bale as Bruce...

Rocket Boys is a bestselling memoir by Homer Hickam published in 1998. It was made into a movie the year titled October Sky (an anagram of Rocket Boys) in the year following its publication, and the memoir was subsequently re-published under the...

The Return of Martin Geurre has roots in both fiction and non-fiction. The book, written in 1983 by Canadian and American author Natalie Zemon Davis, centers around the 16th century legendary story of Martin Geurre. Geurre, who had a wooden leg,...

How do you follow up a debut novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? The answer is, you don't - at least, not with another novel. University of Southern California professor, and multiple award winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen...

A young adult fantasy novel, Red Queen was published in 2015 and written by American author Victoria Aveyard. In the novel, there are different types of people - Reds and Silvers among them. The Silvers have special blood that gives them special...

"The Red Convertible" is a short story by American author Louise Erdrich. The story and its characters draw heavily on the author's own partial Native American background: Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa...

It is one thing to receive universal critical acclaim and commercial success with your debut novel, and quite another thing entirely to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for it; this extraordinary experience graced University of Southern...