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First published in the London Mercury in 1921, The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a short story by Katherine Mansfield that was later re-printed in a compendium of her work entitled The Garden Party and Other Stories. It tells the story of two...

A Different Mirror is a retelling of the history of the United States of America written by academic, historian, author and ethnographer Ronald Takiki. The book was published June 1st 1994 by Back Bay Books, though it was first published in 1993....

The Distance Between Us is a coming of age novel written by Kasie West. It follows a girl named Caymen Meyes as she meets a guy she likes. It spans over 320 pages and was published on July 2nd, 2013 by Harper Teen. It has been translated into...

In a very symbolic, but also rather literal way, Mark Twain was engaging in a bit of gold prospecting himself when he penned “The Californian’s Tale.” While Twain seemed to have an unerring knack for putting his finger directly on the pulse of...

Although Canadian author Margaret Atwood is best-known for writing the book The Handmaid's Tale, she is the author of a number of very well-respected novels. Among them is Cat's Eye, which released after The Handmaid's Tale.

When writing Cat's...

Melton Mclaurin references an enormous number of historical events in his book Celia, A Slave, which tells the story of slavery through the eyes of a female slave. The book is based on the trial of Celia, slave girl to Robert Newsome, who was...

Written in 1904, "The Cop and the Anthem" is a short story by O. Henry, an American author who wrote under this famous pen name; born William Sydney Porter, his stories became known for the surprise twist at the end, and for being set in New York...

Crow Country is a 2011 children's fantasy-mystery novel by Australian author Kate Constable. It won the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Young Readers and the Patricia Wrightson Award for Children's Literature at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon is one of the latest additions to one of America’s oldest original literary genres, the slave narrative. This genre stretches from those published before the off-anthologized Interesting Narrative of the Life of...

Released in 2016, Behold the Dreamers is author Imbolo Mbue's debut novel. It tells the story of a young man named Jende Jonga, an immigrant from Cameroon. After looking for a while for a job, Jende gets a prestigious job for a Lehman Brothers...

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was also the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category. The honor was a culmination of her trajectory...

Ran is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's rendering of Shakespeare's King Lear, mixed with an adaptation of the legends of the Japanese daimyō, Mōri Motonari. It was produced in 1985 to critical acclaim, and is widely considered one of the...

Director Jingle Ma has been quite outspoken in his insistence that this version of the story of Mulan is vastly different to the more familiar 1998 version from Walt Disney. Unlike its Disney predecessor, this is not an animated movie; made in...

Cultivating the Mind of Love by Vietnamese Buddhist and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thich Nhat Hanh) is a essentially a guide on how to love, according to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, as it shows the way it is practiced. The book was first...

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is Martin McDonagh's third full-length feature film. It is also his first feature-length film to win an Academy Award (his 2004 short film, Six Shooter, won the Best Live Action Short Film Academy Award)....

Blackass is no doubt an exceptionally complex and unique book. However, it received exceedingly mixed -- and skewed slightly negative -- reviews. Michael Schaub of NPR called the book "audacious" but remarked that "Blackass, [al]though very good...

Kenneth Slessor is considered to be one of the first truly Australian poets, largely because he was a first-generation Australian, rather than a settler, or a transported prisoner, from England, as most of the well-known poets that went before him...

A Very Very Very Dark Matter (released in 2018) represents somewhat of a homecoming for playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. For most of his career, McDonagh solely worked in theater. However, he has since released a number of films: his...

Scotland would seem like an unlikely place in which to set a science fiction story about an extra-terrestrial woman who preys on men; yet, this is the setting for Jonathan Glazer's 2013 fantasy movie that is very loosely adapted from Michel...

Milton wrote “Lycidas” a few months after his friend, Edward King, died in a shipwreck in 1637. The poem is a pastoral elegy—a form of poetry used to memorialize the dead—and has become one of the most famous reflections on loss in the English...

Olga Tokarczuk is a modern Polish writer, whose works are focused on human origin and place in the world. Questions of self-identity and self-recognition are rather keen in the modern world of globalization, and Olga Tokarczuk, as many other...

De Republica Anglorum was written by Sir Thomas Smith in 1562 during the time of his occupation as the ambassador to Queen Elizabeth in France. His job as ambassador was to describe and evaluate the “English social institutions, judicial system...

"To Wordsworth" is an altered Shakespearean sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and addressed to William Wordsworth, mourning Wordsworth's turn to reactionary politics exemplified by his 1814 book The Excursion.

In 1814, William Wordsworth...

Although Sir Gowther could legitimately be considered a poem, it is more usually referred to as a tall-rhyme romance, consisting of twelve stanzas that read more like short paragraphs than actual poetic verses. Dating from the Middle Ages, it...