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The Silver Chair is the sixth novel in the Chronicles of Narnia series, penned in the early 1950s by acclaimed British author and literary scholar C.S. Lewis. Despite the fact that these chronicles are some of the most popular and enduring stories...

A year after another resounding success with Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis released its sequel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Finished before the first novel in the Chronicles of Narnia series was released, Dawn Treader follows Edmund and Lucy...

After conjuring a unique fantasy world in 1950's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis released Prince Caspian, 1951's followup to the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Prince Caspian directly continues the story started...

Charles Bukowski, an underground American poet, was born during 1920 and died during 1994. He was born in Germany and was brought to the United States at two-years-old. In addition to poetry, he wrote prose, novels, and short stories - all...

Ever wonder why a particular breed of woman in the 1920s who rebelled against traditional and conservative conventions was called a “flapper.” This is not the place to answer that question. Thoroughly Modern Millie will do the job, however, along...

Stanley Kubrick is a master of both satire and science fiction, but also achieved renown with the 1960 historical epic Spartacus. The film has positive reviews and grossed $60 million (the most of any Universal Studios film until Airport grossed...

Franklin Schaffner directed the original Planet of the Apes for release it would come to be the single most amazing year ever for science fiction movies. In 1968, the world was not only introduced to the idea of a future earth ruled by apes, but...

Lucky is a memoir by prominent novelist Alice Sebold, who also wrote The Lovely Bones. The book chronicles her experience as a rape survivor and the tumultuous months that followed where she had to defend herself against her father, her peers, and...

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange things is a collection of short stories. The stories are of Japanese origin and are retold by the narrator, stories that he heard of during his time in Japan. The stories are based on Buddhist religion and...

Think of this film as the original Trainspotting, except that in this version, trains are actually spotted instead of bare arms. Closely Watched Trains became only the second film produced in Czechoslovakia to win the Academy Award for Best...

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks, premiering in 1990 and eventually receiving an Off-Broadway production in 2016. The play was praised by critics for its complexity, covering diverse...

Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West is a performance art piece written, directed, and staged by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena for their international touring art exhibition The Year of the White Bear and Two...

Early Life and Inspirations

Abe Akira was born in Tokyo in 1924. From a young age, he developed a fascination with literature and philosophy, drawing inspiration from both Japanese classics and Western modernist writers such as Franz Kafka. These...

The title of Jesmyn Ward’s wistful memoir about growing up in Mississippi and the men who shaped and defined that live derives from come from one of the quotes attributed to Harriet Tubman. Tubman was talking about the pain of losing the men so...

The Orkneyinga Saga is the history of the Earls of Orkney which was written anonymously by an Icelandic author. It was originally published in the 1200s but has since been translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. Joseph Anderson served as...

High Tide in Tucson is a compilation of 25 essays by Barbara Kingsolver, a writer and ecologist, centering around the themes of family, community, and ecology. The book was published in 1995, and praised for its well-written narrative style and...

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin first appeared in Amazing Stories magazine in 1971. The title of the book, as well as some quotes placed in the beginning of every chapter, are taken from Chuang Tzu works. Others are taken from H. G. Wells,...

The Shadowy Third and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that was published in 1923 and written by Ellen Glasgow. This is her only short story collection, as her novels receive more general attention. Glasgow was an American author who...

Sheppard Lee is a novel published in 1836 and written by Robert Montgomery Bird. Bird was an American writer, who specialized in novels and plays, as well as a physician. Bird was born to a wealthy family in Delaware and taken in by his rich...

Some academics have suggested that Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills” should be regarded as the first work of American fiction which can rightly be categorized as an example of Realism. Not that it is entirely so; the caveat placed...

Burial Rites is Hannah Kent's debut novel, published in 2014, and winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award, and more. About an Icelandic woman sentenced to death after she is charged with...

“The Monument” is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop originally published in 1939 and then collected in her first book of poetry, North and South, in 1946. The poem is an example of what is known as ekphrastic verse which is just fancy literary...

An American short-story writer, novelist, editor, and poet, Howard Phillip Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was from Providence, Rhode Island. He was heavily inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Algernon Blackwood, as well as...

Mysterious Kor, written between 1941 and 1944, contains traces of Elizabeth Bowen's biography. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1899 but spent her childhood in Dublin and at Bowen Court, the family home in Cork, England. Bowen was 13 when her...