Saint Joan is a play written by Bernard Shaw, premiering in 1923. In the early 1920s, Shaw was experiencing a period of professional depletion. Between 1918 and 1920, he had written a cycle of 5 interconnected plays called Back to Methuselah. When...

Few ancient texts are known today -- and even fewer are still in print. Chinese General Sun Tzu's The Art of War is one of the few ancient texts still known, published, and widely read across the world. To that end, The Art of War has been...

An American Marriage is an interesting novel. Part of it is told in the third person; other parts are told in the first person in an epistolary form (i.e. letters). It tells the story of a middle-class black couple named Roy and Celestial. The two...

To date, British Playwright Alan Ayckbourn has written over 79 published and/or performed full-length plays. Absurd Person Singular is his 12th play. It first premiered off-Broadway in 1972 and on-Broadway in October of 1974 and received very...

Leigh Hunt was a famous Romantic writer, editor, and critic who lived from 1784 to 1859. Being a prominent literary figure he was the contemporary of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Hunt's literary career began with the...

To the North was originally published in 1932, a time when few women writers were able to get the same fame and notoriety as their male counterparts. Elizabeth Bowen and To the North helped to change that. Bowen's fascinating life is reflected in...

The Ghost Sonata (Swedish title: Spöksonaten) was written in 1907 and first performed on January 21st, 1908 at Strindberg’s Intimate Theater in Stockholm. The play was unpopular among theatrical critics of the time and only secured critical...

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...

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...