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An important yet underrated memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994) is an exquisite work by Tobias Wolff. The book interpolates autobiographical elements and is essentially about the experiences of the author as an active...

Dame Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is a 1983 British novella which narrates the supernatural experiences of the novella’s protagonist, Arthur Kipps, during his time spent working as a solicitor within the fictional town of Crythin Gifford. Set...

Philaster; or, Love Lies-a-Bleeding is a story of romantic intrigue set in the court of the King of Sicily revolving around conventional courtly entanglements like a princess being promised by her father to one man while she is actually in love...

My World of the Unknown is a short story that is part of Alifa Rifaat’s larger collection of short stories, Distant View of a Minaret. The collection Distant View of a Minaret was published in 1983. Nearly all of her works in this collection...

The Play of Adam (Le Jeu d’Adam in the original French and also known in English as The Service for Representing Adam) dates back to the year 1180, thus giving it a notable place in history as one of the earliest (if not the earliest) drama...

Kipling is considered a British author; however, he was born in Bombay, India in 1865. He was educated in England and then returned to India as a young man to live and work. An extremely prolific writer, Kipling produced stories and poetry about...

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a short story collection by Yiyun Li. This work is Li’s first, and it was well received in the literary community. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award as...

Published in 1942, Go Down Moses evolved from connecting a series of previous published short stories by William Faulkner. The result was a novel that that enhances the history of McCaslin family specifically by splitting their family tree into...

The Vine Leaf was written by Maria Cristina Mena, a widely recognized Latina figure in US literature. Mena was born in Mexico City, went to an English boarding school, learned Spanish, English, French, and Italian, and moved to New York when she...

To a God Unknown is a novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1933. To a God Unknown is Steinbeck’s third novel, but he found that this novel was one of the most difficult ones to write. It took him over five years to finish it, making it...

Graduation Day was published in 2013 and aims at questioning authority subtly through its characters. It is a work of fiction that describes a terrible place full of deprivation and terror. In such a place, this book gives space to characters like...

Independent Study (2014) is the second novel in Joelle Charbonneau's The Testing trilogy. It resumes the story of the protagonist, Cia, where the first novel left off: at the start of Independent Study, "Cia is a freshman at the University in Tosu...

As an African-American writer active in New York in the 1920s, Jean Toomer has often been considered a figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer, however, disavowed the connection believing that it placed his race before his work as a poet. Toomer...

The film’s original title was Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, but eventually became Starship Troopers when the producers and screenwriter found the novel of the same title by Robert A. Heinlein. Feeling that it was a better title, they licensed the book...

The Fifth Element is a fantastic action film with the elements of comedy directed by Luc Besson. It has been shot in 1996 at the “Gaumont” studio in France, and released in 1997. The budget of the film encounters 90 million dollars, and at that...

Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unspecified future. The book is written in the same style as many of Margaret Atwood's novels, that of speculative fiction. Although the book reads as if it is telling a...

Ambiguous Adventure, originally titled L'Aventure ambiguë, is a novel by Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane. It was originally published in 1961 in the author's native language.

The novel is about the interaction between the cultures of Africa...

Beasts of No Nation was written by Uzodinma Iweala as part of his undergraduate thesis at Harvard University. His story of Agu, a young African boy forced to become a soldier, was met with great praise and acclaim when officially published in...

Women on the Market is a chapter in a philosophy book published by the French philosopher Luce Irigary. The chapter appears in the volume The sex which is not one and is generally considered as being an essay than can be studied on its own. The...

Jean Anouilh updates the context of the classic Greek drama by Sophocles to make it resonate with the era in which it was written: during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany during World War II. As a result, Antigone can be interpreted as a...

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of Scotland’s most famous literary works, characterized by a macabre sensibility, postmodern narrative structure, and a beguiling blend of religious fanaticism, the gothic, political...

Holes is Louis Sachar's fifth novel, and probably his most loved. The novel took Sachar a year and a half to write, and was published in 1998. Holes combined huge popular appeal with critical success, as Holes won or was nominated for almost...

“The Man Who Lived Underground” began life not as a short story, but as a novel. Author Richard Wright ran into trouble finding a publisher who could get terribly excited about a novel-length story of a man who lives in the subterranean world of...

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American author born on September 30, 1975 in Baltimore, Maryland. After graduating from Woodlawn High School, he attended Howard University, but dropped out in order to pursue a career in journalism. Coates worked at...