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Love Actually is a 2003 British romantic comedy film written and directed by Richard Curtis. The film follows a group of young adults in London, set during the Christmas season. Following ten couples, the film chronicles their romantic and...

There are only three characters in The Drawer Boy, a two-act play by Michael Healey. It is set in Clinton, Ontario, in 1972; the village is a small community that was founded in 1831 close to Lake Huron. The play's plot centers around the owners...

“Diving into the Wreck” is the titular poem of Adrienne Rich’s seventh collection of poetry, which won the National Book Award in 1974. Written at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, this collection is considered one of Rich’s most...

The Dunciad is a scathing work of satire and critique written by Alexander Pope in the mock-heroic style. It was published three separate times, the first edition containing three books, and the final two editions containing an added fourth book,...

In The House at Sugar Beach (2008), author Helene Cooper takes a look at the troubled and violent past of Liberia, the country which she hails from. Particularly, she examines the effects of the 1980 military coup d'état had on her country. Partly...

Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” is a haunting short story published in the New Yorker in 1980. Ozick later included it with a novella about the main character, Rosa, in a single volume also entitled The Shawl.

Ozick is Jewish but did not experience...

It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas fantasy film from 1946, written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra, among others. Indeed, many people contributed to the script, including Dorothy Parker, Dalton Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and...

Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is a short story about four men stranded in a small rowboat in rough seas after their ship capsizes. The men spend over thirty hours in the boat until they wash ashore only to discover that their strongest rower has...

The Devil in The White City, published by Erik Larson in 2003, is a factual account of incidents that occurred in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. Larson weaves the story of the Chicago World’s Fair overseer, Daniel Burnham, and his...

This collection of short stories by Peter Carey is set in a post-Marxist utopia in which obesity is frowned upon and considered counterrevolutionary. Titled The Fat Man in History (1993), Carey asks a number of important questions relevant to the...

British author J.K. Rowling said that the idea for the Harry Potter series “fell into her head” in 1990 while she was riding a train from Manchester to London without a pen to write it down. While she started to write it that evening, her progress...

12 Angry Men is a film from 1957, directed by Sidney Lumet, with a screenplay by Reginald Rose, adapted from his teleplay. It looks at a jury of 12 men as they decide the fate of an 18-year-old defendant who is on trial for the murder of his...

Totaling 272 pages, "Foreign Soil" and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction. Set all across the world -- from Africa, to London, to the United States, to the West Indies, to Australia -- this collection gives a voice to those without one...

In 1839, the first collection of poems by W. B. Yeats was published, taking its name from the last epic-style poem that Yeats ever wrote. The collection also included a number of poems that would be republished as one longer poem that Yeats...

Sherman Alexie's memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a mournful, harrowing book written after the death of his mother at the age of 78, with whom he had a complicated but loving relationship. Through 78 poems, 78 essays, and countless...

There are lots of ways in which a first-time novelist can attain prominence. They can make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list; they can receive rave reviews from literary critics, or, like American author David Wroblewski, they...

First published in 1944, Eleanor Estes's classic children's book The Hundred Dresses is about the remorse a young girl experiences after she stands by while her best friend teases an impoverished classmate who claims to own one hundred dresses.

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Indian author Prajwal Parajuly is particularly well-known for his writings about Nepali speaking people and their culture. The Ghurkha's Daughter is a collection of short stories that dramatize the experiences of the Nepalese people both living in...

Coraline is the first children's novella by British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. The novel takes its name from the story's young, female protagonist. After moving to a new home, Coraline acquaints herself with her eccentric neighbors and explores...

Indian-American author Karan Mahajan's second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, opens with a narrative about the detonation of a bomb in a New Delhi marketplace in 1996, by one of the protagonists, Shockie, a man from Kashmir. The bomb kills...

If given the opportunity to name the top ten most important -- yet controversial -- books, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) would invariably appear on any given list. At its core, Orientalism is a study of, as the title suggests, orientalism. In...

Of the various books that Phillip K. Dick published over the course of his long and illustrious career, 1957's Eye in the Sky is among his lesser-known works. It tells the story of Jack Hamilton, the primary character in the book, and seven other...

At its core, C.S. Lewis' is an allegory. It tells the story of a bus ride from hell to heaven. In the book, Lewis meditates on a number of topics, including: Christianity, good and evil, the Bible, judgment, damnation, and, naturally, heaven and...

Whale Rider, the 2002 film directed by Niki Caro and starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, tells the story of Castle-Hughes' Kahu Paikea Apirana, a twelve year old Maori girl with a big heart -- and even bigger dreams. Ultimately, she wants to become the...