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Cronos is Guillermo del Toro's first feature film. Released in 1993, It set him off as one the freshest directors to watch for as critically the film was praised, though it did not receive a wide American distribution (only 28 theaters). It was...

My Garden is a non-fiction book and somewhat a memoir written by author Jamaica Kincaid. It was published in 1999. Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer and gardener. She has written numerous books, and the most famous were My Garden and A Small...

Nikki Giovanni is considered a top African-American poet of the twentieth century. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee during 1943 and was raised in a family of strong African-American heritage. She gained popularity during the 1960s and...

If for no other reason, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land would hold a place in the history of literature as the first science fiction novel to ever make it onto the New York Times Bestseller List. Published at just the right time in...

Dombey and Son was initially published as "Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation." The novel is typically seen as marking a transition in Dickens's career. His seventh novel, it is notable for showing...

Published in 2011 to immense acclaim, The Tiger's Wife earned Tea Obreht forms of recognition that few writers will see in their lifetimes--let alone at the age of 25. Yet Obreht was exactly that old when her politically conscious, symbolically...

Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is a classic of Black feminist science fiction. Characterized by classic sci-fi conventions such as a post-apocalyptic earth, a character with strange psionic powers, and a belief that it is the destiny of...

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed letter to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to be a black person in America. It spans the personal, such as growing up in Baltimore and his cultivation of an intellectual and...

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a 1999 historical novel by Tracy Chevalier. The novel is inspired by the famous painting of the same name, which was painted by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The precise date of the painting is unknown, but it is...

Citizen: An American Lyric was published in 2014 by American poet Claudia Rankine, and remains a timely, even urgent meditation on race, violence, racism, art, and mediation. The book has been described as both criticism and poetry; critic Michael...

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a national best-seller and a global phenomenon. Chronicling Nafisi's time as a female professor of Western Literature at the University of Tehran in the 1970s, her expulsion from the...

The Lion and the Jewel is one of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s most famous works. While it is a light and amusing comedy, it is also renowned for its complex themes and allegorical structure; it is also notable for its insights into Yoruba...

Dead Poets Society is a 1989 movie starring Robin Williams and directed by Peter Weir. It is set in the ultra-conservative and highly prestigious Welton Academy, an aristocratic public school in the Northeastern United States, and tells the story...

C.S. Lewis is an author of children’s literature. He is most widely known for The Chronicles of Narnia series; he also has written scholarly books and fictional works about Christianity. The Chronicles of Narnia series consists of seven books in...

The Second Sex was published in 1949, at a time when feminism was not yet widely discussed as a pressing social issue. It is widely considered to be a formative text of second-wave feminism. This strain of feminism shifted focus from gaining...

The biggest grossing movie released in June 1974 was Chinatown. That very dark update of film noir featuring one of the most intricate plots in Hollywood grossed 23 million dollars, which was a good 12 million dollars less than the biggest...

Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the 2007 debut collection by British-Punjabi Sikh poet Daljit Nagra. The collection's title is an allusion to three influential works: W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and...

Office Space was written and directed by Mike Judge who also created Beavis and Butt-Head and Silicon Valley. The film premiered in 1999 and was released by 20th Century Fox. Though it was not a major success finanically at the box office, the...

Though published and widely known as The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt's work was originally conceived under the name The Burden of Our Time. This alternate title reveals the purpose of the work: to interrogate the terrible burden...

The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff was published in 1996. It has a complicated plot that involves many certain instances that ultimately intertwine together. A man is shot, another man is fired for writing an untrue obituary, a man loses his...

There remains some discrepancy as to when Yusef Komunyakaa was born. Some documents suggests it was 1941, while others list 1947. It is known with certainty that he was raised in Louisiana with a family of Trinidadian descent. Living in the...

Based on the actual life of Reliance Industries co-founder Dhirubhai Ambani, Guru is a Indian drama film directed by Mani Ratnam and starring Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 in the World Cinema...

The Invention of Morel is a 1940 book by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Winning the 1941 First Municipal Prize for the City of Buenos Aires, the novel was very well received upon publication and instantly became a classic. The Invention of Morel was the...

A Child Called “It,” published in 1995, was Dave Pelzer's first book. It is a nonfiction memoir, telling the story of his abuse as a child from the ages of 4 to 12 at the hands of his mother. It follows his childhood until a teacher at school at...