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Seabiscuit is an equestrian movie directed by Gary Ross, based on the best-selling book of the same name by Lauren Hillenbrand, who also wrote the non-fiction bestseller Unbroken. It tells the story of an unlikely American hero, Seabiscuit, whose...

Pity the Beautiful is a collection of poems by American poet Dana Gioia. Gioia is a noted figure in the poetry world, serving as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003-2009. The book was published in 2012 to critical praise....

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. He was born in York, Auden spent much time of his childhood in Birmingham but was educated at Gresham's school Norfolk, a public school with liberal ideas about...

African Religions and Philosophy is by John Mbiti. It was published in 1970. John Mbiti was a professor, and this book is an extended translation of his lectures. This book applied in many fields, including not only African religion and philosophy...

Between the years 1602 and 1604, the Viscountess Falkland, Elizabeth Cary, wrote the Senecan revenge tragedy, "The Tragedy of Mariam", though it was not published until almost a decade later, in 1613. The play is considered groundbreaking; it is...

Katherine Mansfield is known for her short poems, many of them composed in the early twentieth century. Some of her best known poems include, "Voices of the Air", "Countrywomen", and "A Few Rules For Beginners", all of which are under five stanzas...

The Gods Are Athirst, also known as The Gods Will Have Blood, is a fictional story by French author Anatole France. The book is set during the French Revolution, and was published in 1912. The story follows the main character Évariste Gamelin, who...

The Map of Love is a historical fiction novel written by Ahdaf Soueif. The novel was first published in 1999. Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian writer who earned a PhD in literature in England. Her books are known to reflect historical events.

For its...

Mother! was written and directed by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. It was produced by Scott Franklin, Ari Handel, and Aronofsky himself and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film was made for an estimated budget of $33,000,000 and grossed...

It took Anita Amirrezvani five years to complete the first draft of her debut novel The Blood of Flowers. To capture the essence of the world, she traveled twice to Isfahan, the city where the story takes place. She spent countless hours...

Male Daughters, Female Husbands is a 1987 book by Ifi Amadiume. Critically acclaimed, it explores gender roles in Africa and poses that before European influence in colonization, African society was largely egalitarian in terms of sex.

In Male...

Pnin was first released in an episodic series in the New Yorker in 1954. Written by Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), this novel is by an author known more for creepy pedophilia in his plot lines, not comedy or satire. Yet Pnin is filled with intelligent...

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan; a city which would go on to attain a level of immortality by virtue of so many of the poet’s verse being set there. He would go on to earn an M.A. from Wayne State University in 1954 to which he...

The Way of All Flesh is a Victorian novel written in the ten year period between 1873 and 1884 by Samuel Butler. It was finally published in 1903. It is widely accepted to be semi-autobiographical. The book doggedly brings to light and attacks...

The President is a novel published in 1946 that firmly and forever established the reputation of Miguel Ángel Asturias as one of the most important Latin American novelists of the 20th century. The final composition represents a work that the...

Daughter of Earth is an autobiographical novel published by Agnes Smedley in 1929. The story spans from the 1890’s to the 1920’s and essentially charts in semi-fictionalized form the story of Smedley’s own awakening political consciousness. A...

A River Runs Through It was released in 1992. Directed by Robert Redford and written by Richard Friedenberg based of the story of the same title by Norman Maclean. It was produces by Patrick Markey, Amalia Mato and Robert Redford and distributed...

Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov. The book was not published in a set year, rather released in short segments of stories published from 1936 to 1951. The book mainly talks about the life of Nabokov...

Woman of Colour is a novel published in 2007 (Broadview Press) by an anonymous writer. Although the novel is fictional, it offers a unique account on the wife of a Black heiress after the slave trade was abolished in Britain. The main character in...

Eye Killers is a science fiction, paranormal novel written by Aaron Albert Carr. It was first published in 1995. A. A. Carr is a Navajo-Laguna writer and film maker. Eye Killers was his first published novel.

The story itself focuses on a thousand...

It Comes at Night was released in 2017. Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults and produced by David Kaplan and Andrea Roa. The film was distributed by A24 with an estimated bydget of $5,000,000. It went on to gross $14,000,000 domestically in...

Orson Welles began making his film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello in 1948—literally began filming in that year—and the film would not be seen by the public until 1952. The story behind the financial and artistic struggle to get the...

Autobiography of a Face is a memoir by Lucy Grealy. It was first published in January 1994. Grealy was an Irish-American author and poet who won many awards for her poetry and autobiography. She died in 2002.

The memoir tells the story of Grealy...

The Long Valley, published in 1938, is the ninth volume from John Steinbeck and is a collection of 12 unrelated short stories. The book was released to positive critical reviews and robust sales for a short story collection. All but one of the...