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Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers (2018) explores the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The novel follows a man named Yale Tishman, who works at an art gallery and is on the cusp of bringing a collection of extraordinary 1920s paintings and drawings...

Daniel Ellsberg was once a nuclear war planner and presidential advisor (as the title suggests). In The Doomsday Machine, published in 2017, Ellsberg provides an in-depth look at nuclear armaments in the world and how the U.S. uses it. Ellsberg...

Published in 1992 and written by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man is a book detailing the events after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. In his book, Fukuyama claims that this marks the end...

Published in 2016 by award-winning American author, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad is a gripping account of a runaway slave, Cora, as she makes her way through a fictionalized American landscape. Throughout her journey to freedom, Cora...

The Trojan Women, also known as the Troades, was composed by the Greek playwright Euripides in 415 B.C.E. in response to the Athenian massacre on the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. Melos had been attempting to maintain its...

Amy Tan is best known for her novels and children's books, but she has also written several short stories, published both formally and informally. Her most popular short story is "Fish Cheeks", which is a true story published in 1987. The story...

All Our Relations is a 2018 non-fictional book examining the effects of past genocides on indigenous youth in North America. Recent studies have indicated that one out of three deaths among young indigenous people is due to suicide, likely because...

David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) tells the story of the sex lives of four people: two men (Dan Shapiro and Bernard Litko) and two women (Deborah Soloman and Joan Webber) as they try to successfully swing. The story is profane and...

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...

Looking for Richard is a 1996 film directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Al Pacino. It is an exploration of Pacino's love for Shakespeare, particularly Shakespeare's Richard III, and it playfully intersperses documentary-style interviews with...

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...

Amiri Baraka is known for his drama, poetry, and founding of the Black Arts Movement. His works Dutchman and The Slave are considered companion pieces in Black America’s “consciousness epic.” At the time of their staging and publication, Baraka...

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...

Diary of A Wimpy Kid was in the works since 1998, when Jeff Kinney first came up with the idea for the character Greg. Kinney spent several years writing jokes revolving around Greg and workshopping the character, but it wouldn't be until 2004...

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...