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Sherman Alexie's first book, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992 by an independent press, and Alexie was 26 years old at the time. His work received critical acclaim and attracted a great deal of attention from mainstream...

Around eighty-three million people speak Marathi, the official language of the South-Western region of India. Silence! The Court is in Session (Shanatata! Court Chalu Aahe!) is a play written in the Marathi language by playwright Vijay Tendulkar;...

Devil on the Cross is a novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, originally written and published in 1980 under the name Caitani Mutharabaini in the Gĩkũyũ language. The following year, it was translated to English by the author himself, and it was published...

“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is one of Leo Tolstoy’s most gripping and affecting short stories. Published in 1886, the story examines the futility of chasing wealth, depicts the perils of greed and pride, and condemns corrupt economic...

Oliver Twist was first published in 1837 in serial format, in Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was editing at the time. Oliver Twist was Dickens’s second novel and his first real social novel, critiquing the harm public institutions inflicted...

Calico Joe is a novel written by John Grisham, inspired by baseball. Published in 2012, the book mixes fact and fiction and is overall a great read for lovers of the sport. The novel is about pursuing a career in baseball and follows a...

Frank Stockton's short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" first published in 1882, tells the story of a "semi-barbaric" princess who is thrown into a difficult situation: having to decide whether her lover will marry another woman, or face a ravenous...

While Langston Hughes wrote a myriad of plays, short stories, and essays, he is primarily known for his poetry, especially the verses he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars and critics regularly refer to him the “African American Poet...

A Life Sentence is a literary fiction novel by Adeline Sergeant, an English writer from the 19th century. The novel follows a trial for a murder of a respected member of the community called Mr. Vane, who left a widow and children behind. The...

Originally titled “Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios”, the movie is based on a French play called “La Voix humaine” from the 1930. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a Spanish dark comedy movie released in 1988.

The movie follows...

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a mixture of comedy and horror based on the musical and the book of the same title, directed by Jim Sharman. The movie is a satiric take on the movies from the first half of the twentieth century, with horror and...

The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is one of the most prominent pieces of sociological American literature, and one of the most important pieces of African-American literature. Previously published in Atlantic Monthly, the work is a...

Hayavadana is a 1971 play by Indian writer Girish Karnad. It tells the story of best friends Devadatta and Kapila, and their love, Padmini, as well as that of a man in the story with the face of a horse (the title of the okat means “one with a...

Published in 1819, The Vampyre is a novella of romantic, gothic, vampire fiction written by John William Polidori, a young physician who worked for the famous poet Lord Byron. In the novella, Aubrey, a young, wealthy orphan, watches his loved ones...

Directed by New Zealand-born Taika Waititi, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) tells the story of a young man named Ricky Baker, who gets sent to live with a couple named Hector and Bella Faulkner after exhausting nearly every other option for a...

The Rabbits is a 1999 picture book that depicts rabbits invading a country and displacing the indigenous marsupial population. An allegory for the British colonization of Australia, the story shows how the rabbits' and marsupials' initial...

Published in 2000, Fever 1793 is Laure Halse Anderson’s novel about an epidemic of yellow fever that struck the city of Philadelphia in 1793. The novel is a work of historical fiction: it features a blend of real events and historical figures with...

Whitman published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror, but it wasn't until years later that he decided to leave his career as a newspaper editor and become a full-time poet. Around 1850, he began to write what would become Leaves of...

"Story of Your Life" is an award-winning science fiction novella by acclaimed short story writer Ted Chiang. The approximately 50-page-long work was first published in 1998 in the second volume of the Starlight anthology. It was then reprinted in...

“Sunshine State” is a short story which is a part of the collection called “Everything Change an Anthology of Climate Fiction” written by Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson and published in 2016. The authors categorize the story in the so-called...

Introduction

The relationship between art and religion has been a topic of great interest and debate for centuries. In the context of Christianity, the discussion of art and its relationship to the Bible has been particularly significant. Francis...

Mansfield Park, considered the author's most ambitious novel, was published anonymously, as were all of Jane Austen's novels, in 1814. While Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are considered, as one critic remarks "the gay offsprings of...

Todd Strasser's "On the Bridge" is a short story about a teenage boy whose desire to be like his cool friend results in a violent confrontation that exposes the friend's cowardice and pathological lying.

While smoking his first cigarette on a...

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society....