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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...

Abe Akira is a renowned Japanese author, known for his unique style of storytelling and his ability to weave together elements of fantasy and reality in his short stories. Born in Tokyo in 1924, Abe began writing at a young age and quickly...

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...

Turtle Island is Gary Snyder’s volume of thematically related verse which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974 and is considered by many the zenith of his career. After publishing half a dozen volumes that barely managed even to...

Wendy Cope is a British writer who is known primarily for her poems. Wendy Cope was born in England in 1945 and for an extended period of time she worked as a teacher. Wendy Cope began writing late in her life, having her first collection of...

The 18th century proved to be a revolutionary moment in the long history of the institution of marriage. In England, at any rate, some of the longstanding contractual and transactional conventions underwent a period of renegotiation in the public...

Howl's Moving Castle is a children's fantasy novel written in 1986 by renowned English fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of the return of the evil Witch of the Waste after fifty years of dormancy, and her threatening behavior...

American Gods is a novel written by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman in 2001. The story follows the protagonist, Shadow Moon, a man who is released from prison only to find himself in the midst of a war between the gods of old and the new gods of...

As the 18th century was slowly drawing to a close, Thomas and Elizabeth Homer Strickland welcomed their ninth child, Elizabeth. One might well say she was born to become a writer; five of her siblings pursued the same career path. Agnes had chosen...

A Cop's Life: True Stories from the Heart Behind the Badge is a collection of twenty short stories by Las Vegas Police Department Sergeant Randy Sutton, that detail the experiences' law enforcement officers go through in the line of duty. It was...

Published in 2011, Machine Man is Australian writer Max Barry’s fourth novel. The work began in March 2009 as a page a day entry five times a week posted to the author’s personal website. These weekly contributions combined with reader feedback...

Written by Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds is a poignant, realistic story of the complex dynamics of life on the battlefield. The book was critically acclaimed, winning many awards, including the 2013 Hemingway Foundation Award....