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Although the majority of the plot takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, Kate Atkinson's third novel to feature retired police detective Jackson Brodie actually begins in Devon, in the south east of England, where a six year old girl, Joanna,...

Water by the Spoonful is a play written by playwright, poet and essayist Quiara Alegría Hudes. Hudes also wrote a book for the musical In the Heights. The play premiered on October 20, 2011 at Hartford Stage in Connecticut. It is played in English...

Released in September 2019, Red at the Bone tells the story of a young woman named Melody, a sixteen year old who is celebrating her birthday in her grandparents house in Brooklyn, New York. Although it tells the story of Melody's family history,...

Castle Rackrent is unusual among Maria Rackrent's works in that it is one of the few novels she wrote that was not edited by her father. Published in 1800, it is a short novel / novella that tells the story of four heirs to the Rackrent fortune as...

Elizabeth Strout first wrote about her protagonist, Olive Kitteridge, in her 2008 novel bearing her heroine's name; this sequel follows a similar format, and consist of thirteen short stories set on the coast of Maine, that do not follow on from...

Directly translated from its original language, the title of text is literally one with the skin of a tiger; this Medieval epic poem was penned by Georgia's national poet Shota Rustaveli in the twelfth century. It is divided into Rustavelian...

The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle among perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his...

C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, is considered by many to be one of history's greatest apologists (logical defenders of the Christian faith). Out of many nonfiction works, The Problem of Pain stands out as one of...

Although he died destitute, Philip K. Dick is responsible for some of the most inventive -- and iconic -- science fiction stories of all time. Among such stories include Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle, Minority Report, and A Scanner...

Jasper Jones tells the story of Charlie Bucktin, a thirteen-year-old boy living in Western Australia during the Vietnam War. He befriends the town outcast, Jasper, but soon finds himself in a dire situation that tests his morality. Charlie helps...

"Miss Brill" is a short story written and published in 1920 by Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand writer. The story was published towards the end of the writer’s life while she was living in London. Mansfield's own life was characterized by...

Most likely written in 1579, but not published until 1595, Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy is a new response to an old charge against the legitimacy of poetry, one that had been leveled against the literary arts at least since Plato in The...

No Sugar is a play written by Jack Davis, published in 1986. It takes place during the Great Depression in Western Australia and follows an Aboriginal family, the Millimuras, as they navigate life on corrupt reservations and contend with the...

First published in the Japanese literary publication Shinchō in January 1922, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove" (or "In a Bamboo Grove") is about a young samurai killed in mysterious circumstances. Pieced together from contradictory...

"In Those Years" is the second poem in Adrienne Rich's Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995). Written after the end of the Reagan presidency, this poem appears in a section of the book entitled "What Kind of Times Are These." It thus...

Invictus is a film from 2009 directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Anthony Peckham about the improvement of the South African Springboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup, which took place during the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Mandela had a...

David Malouf's Ransom (2009) is a profound novel of immense suffering, sorrow, and redemption.

It retells the story of Homer's Iliad from books 22 to 24. While the Iliad covers the entirety of the last year of the Trojan War, a famous conflict in...

"On Fairy-Stories" is a critical essay by J.R.R. Tolkien, the acclaimed author of The Lord of the Rings. The essay was published in its final form in the collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams from Oxford University Press in 1947, but the...

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that was first published in 1946. Kazantzakis is a Cretan author who is considered one of the most influential modern Greek writers in history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in...

When it was released in 1999, The Freedom Writers Diary was met with critical acclaim and financial success -- but it was not released without controversy. In 2008, a teacher was suspended for a year and a half without pay for teaching the book...

Widely believed to be Terence Rattigan's best work, The Browning Version was first performed on September 8 1948, at the historic Phoenix Theater in London. The play is set in a private school for boys; one of the main characters, Classical...

Stephen Hawking's goal in writing A Brief History of Time (first published in 1988) was to write an easily accessible book for layman with little or no prior scientific knowledge. The book introduces readers to ideas like the creation and...

There are two main characters in Sebastian Faulks' fourth novel, Birdsong, and they share a plot line that is separated by sixty years. The story follows the life of Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in France during World War...

Deadly, unna? is Philip Gwynne's debut novel, and like Spring, he came onto the teen literary scene like a lion. He sets the story in his native Australia against a background of interracial difficulties and friendships that are possible through a...