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"Digging" appears in Seamus Heaney's first major volume of poetry, called Death of a Naturalist (1966). The poems in this book deal mainly with Heaney's rural upbringing, his family, and how his identity formed in that environment. The book was...

A Wrinkle in Time is Madeleine L'Engle's first and most popular book for young adults. It was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though the book was rejected numerous times by publishers before finally being published in 1962, just before...

A White Heron and Other Stories was published in 1886. Jewett had begun her writing career in 1868 when her story, “Mr. Bruce,” was published in Atlantic Monthly. Jewett had a supportive relationship with Thomas Fields, the editor of the magazine,...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" in 1955, and gave it the subtitle of A Tale For Children. "Very Old Man" is perhaps the clearest and most famous example of a genre that Garcia Marquez helped to create: magical...

Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was written after Hosseini traveled back to his native Afghanistan to examine for himself the nation’s situation in the aftermath of decades of turmoil. In early 2007, Hosseini told Time...

Kiese Laymon generally writes essays and articles for sites like ESPN, Gawker, and the New York Times. Prior to the release of Heavy: An American Memoir in 2018, he'd only written two books, both of which released in 2013: a novel called Long...

First published in 1974, "Freedom and Resentment" and Other Essays is a collection of essays by British philosopher Sir Peter Frederick Strawson, commonly known as P.F. Strawson. Strawson "was a leading member of the ordinary language school of...

Miracle on 34th Street is a Christmas classic film directed by George Seaton who also wrote the screenplay based on the story by Valentine Davies. The picture was released in 1947 and was produced by William Perlberg with a budget of $630,000. It...

The Muppet Christmas Carol was released in 1992. It was directed by Brian Henson and based off of Charles Dickens' classic novel "A Christmas Carol", with a screenplay written by Jerry Juhl. Martin G. Baker along with Henson produced the film...

Scrooge was released in 1951 and was directed by Brian Desmond Hurst with a screenplay by Noel Langley which was based off of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. It stars Alastair Sim as the titular character, Mervy Johns, Hermione Baddely,...

Home Alone is a 1990 Christmas comedy film directed by Chris Columbus starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. It follows the eight year old Kevin McCallister after he is accidentally left behind by his family during their vacation....

The Short Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson, better known as Skin Folk, is a 2001 collection of short stories by Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson's stories draw mostly from the science fiction and fantasy genres and feature aspects...

Survivors Club is a non-fiction book by Michael and Debbie Bornstein. Michael, the child in color on the front photograph of the book, was able to survive a horrible life at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. In this book, Michael details the...

In 1932, a German woman by the name of Margaret Schwartzkopf, was the guest of Mary Elizabeth Frye, in Baltimore. She was worried about her mother back in Germany, who was ill, but she was unable to go home to see her because of the increasingly...

Lydia Davis is an American writer and translator. Davis was born in 1947 and grew up in a very intellectual environment as the daughter of Hope Hale Davis, an American feminist and writer and Robert Gorham David, a university professor. She has...

Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (first published in 1959) tells the story of the eponymous Duddy Kravitz, a smart, sassy, and scheming hustler who spends most of his day going to school at a local Jewish academy and working...

A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines's eighth book, and is in some ways his most autobiographical. Many aspects of the novel are drawn from Gaines's personal experiences growing up in Oscar, Louisiana. For example, the plantation school where...

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of two novels written by John Kennedy Toole, the other being The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16. Neither book was published during Toole's lifetime. Following Toole's suicide, his mother sought out author...

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is based on Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel of the same name. The title comes from the Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange", which means "very queer indeed (the meaning can be, but isn't necessarily,...

The title, A Burnt-Out Case, refers to a condition identified by Doctor Colin in the novel: some lepers develop severe psychological numbness as a result of their disease. Even after they are cured and cease to feel the pain of their condition,...

This selection of stories includes John Updike's most popular and critically debated short works. "Ace in the Hole," "A & P," and "Pigeon Feathers" are all characteristic of Updike's early style; indeed, 1953's "Ace" was the 21-year-old...

First published in 1922, Babbitt is set during the 1920s (the Jazz Age), the period in America following World War I that is considered especially materialistic and spiritually depraved. Politically, the country was charged with fear due to the...

Sir William Golding composed Lord of the Flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the novel's composition, Golding, who had published an anthology of poetry nearly two decades earlier, had been working for a number of years as a teacher...

Mark Twain is one of the most famous figures in American literature, and is known for his novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What is not as widely known about him is the surprising amount of essays...