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Brick Lane is the first novel by Monica Ali. Despite being the work of an unknown writer, the novel was hotly anticipated. She earned a book deal with a significant advance based on some preliminary chapters. In January 2003, before the novel had...

Monster is a young-adult drama novel written by Walter Dean Myers. Myers, who spent most of his life in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, drew from his personal and proximal experiences to portray the story of Steve Harmon, an...

Star Wars: A New Hope is the first film to be made in what would become the gigantic Star Wars franchise. Conceived by creator George Lucas as a "space opera," the film instantly became a phenomenon at the moment of its release. It paved the way...

First published in Spanish in 1931, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (English title: Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) is a nivola by Miguel de Unamuno. The nivola is a literary genre of Unamuno’s own design, longer than a short story but shorter than a...

The Consolidator or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, is a 1705 satirical fantasy/science fiction novel by English author Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.

As described by Karen Severud Cook in her article "Daniel...

The Crossover is a novel in verse about brotherhood and basketball. Its author, Kwame Alexander, aims to reach a wide variety of readers, including reluctant ones, through sports stories that are really about family, love, and friendship.

The...

Montana 1948 was written in Wisconsin and published in 1993 by Larry Watson as the follow-up to his doctoral thesis-turned-first novel In a Dark Time. The setting within Montana is the fictional town of Bentrock just—as the title indicates—a few...

On November 28th, 2018, Margaret Atwood announced a sequel to her 1985 classic novel The Handmaid's Tale. Announcing the novel on her Twitter profile, she wrote: "Yes indeed to those who asked: I’m writing a sequel to The #HandmaidsTale....

Nikole Hannah-Jones became a staff writer for the New York Times in 2016; she devised the 1619 Project to take another look at the legacy of slavery in the United States, its release neatly coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of the...

In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.

For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a...

Published in 1939, as Britain was entering a period of great austerity due to the declaration of war against Germany, Party Going might at first seem like a wholly tone-deaf novel for its time, largely because it deals with a group of wealthy...

The story of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (originally published in 1952) is an interesting one to say the least. Highsmith originally published the book under the name Claire Morgan because she feared becoming "a lesbian book writer" and...

It is strange that there are very few mentions of Athenagoras' writings by other early Christian apologists, because he was well-known, and was also considered influential amongst both his peers and early Christians alike. He was respected for the...

Graham Greene's A Gun for Sale (1936) is not one of Greene's best novels, but it is perhaps one of his most important. It set the stage for what was to come in his ultra-famous novel Brighton Rock, which tells the story of, as the title and some...

It's very likely that few people today who are not serious literary scholars have ever heard of Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh's excellent satirical novel mocking the rich and decadent society of London after World War I (published in 1930). However,...

Richard Wagamese published Indian Horse in 2012. A prolific and acclaimed author, Wagamese's Indian Horse is widely considered to be his best work.

The novel is narrated by Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway youth who is forced into residential schools...

Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is a collection of short stories by Sui Sin Far (who published the collection under the name pen name Edith Maude Eaton). Although not incredibly popular, the collection was incredibly important because it marked the...

Marriage à la Mode is widely regarded as John Dryden's most famous play. It was first performed in London by the King's Company in 1673, and centers around two different plots that entangle in a tragicomic web of mistaken identity, romantic...

“The Union Buries Its Dead” is a story written by Henry Lawson, an Australian writer and poet. It takes place in Bourke, a small town in rural New South Wales, and narrates the burial of a union laborer, who drowned in a river. Lawson wrote “The...

Looking for Alibrandi was written in 1992 by Melina Marchetta, and was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. It was Marchetta’s first book, and its first print sold out within two months of its release. The novel won the Children's Book...

Breathless is the less-than-perfect translation of the French title of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1960 explosion into the world of international cinema: À Bout de Souffle. Along with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was released a little under a...

If given the opportunity to name one of the best films ever made, many would justifiably cite Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965) as their favorite. Adapted from the 1959 stage play of the same name, the film tells the true story of the Von...

When Grease was released in the summer of 1978, few people would have predicted that it would become one of the movie industry's biggest cult hits of all time; nor would they have imagined that generations yet unborn would know the movie's lyrics...

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (released in 1991 and called T2 for short) is one of the few cases in film history where a sequel is considered better than the original film (in this case, 1984's The Terminator). Directed and co-written once again by...