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The Great Escape was based upon a book written by Australian World War II veteran Paul Brickhill; his first-person account told of his experiences as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III, a prison camp in Poland where the Germans kept British and...

Though he is mostly known for his children's fiction, Roald Dahl was also a prolific writer of adult short stories, poetry, screenplays, and memoirs. In fact, Dahl first gained acclaim as an adult short-story writer, and "The Landlady" and Other...

First published in June 1977 by Del Rey Books, Anne McCaffrey's Get Off the Unicorn was met with rapturous critical acclaim. McCaffrey's biographer summed up the importance of the book nicely, writing that "the power and appeal of [her] reputation...

The Secret Garden is a children's novel by British writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. The story centers around a little girl named Mary Lennox who was born in India to wealthy parents. Mary's life in India suddenly comes to...

The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit poem describing the mythical Kurukshetra War between two sets of brothers descended from the king Bharata: the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is considered so historically important to the Hindu tradition that...

One of the most notable things about Sean Baker's 2017 movie is that it was the first film for many of its stars, including Brooklyn Prince, whose prior screen experience had been on a Chuck-E-Cheese commercial, and Bria Vinaite, who was spotted...

The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a comedy of manners in five acts that premiered at Covent Garden Theatre in 1775. It is considered one of Sheridan's best-known works and in addition to receiving many revivals, it has served as an...

Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (originally published in Sweden in 2013 ad in the United States as a translated version in 2015) tells the story of a young girl named Elsa. She lives in Sweden and knows she is...

City of God is a collection of short stories and poems by Gil Cuadros, an author who battles the disease AIDS himself and who uses his writing to de-sensationalize the homosexual identity and people struggling with AIDS.

The title of the...

Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs first premiered on December 10th, 1982 in a Pre-Broadway showcase. It is the first in Simon's so-called Eugene Trilogy (which consists of this play, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound). Brighton Beach Memoirs is...

Ursula Le Guin's science fiction novella, The Word for World is Forest, has the unusual distinction of having been published for the first time twice; the first time it appeared was in 1972, in an anthology of similar writings entitled Again,...

There are two types of Japanese poetry. The first, composed by classical poets, is actually written in the Chinese language. The second, Waka, is a traditional poetry written in the Japanese language; it is the latter that Ueda Akinari is most...

Although he was perhaps best-known as the best friend of famed Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkein, Christopher Wiseman was a very fine author and poet in his own right. Born in England just prior to the outbreak of WWII, Wiseman moved around...

Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) is one of the many classic films released during the 1970s and 1980s depicting the Vietnam War (other films of that era include Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter). The film was a major critical and financial success....

Andy Weir self-published The Martian as an e-book in 2011. An example of "hard sf," in which factual speculation is minimized, The Martian includes scientific descriptions of space-flight, rocketry, thermodynamics, biology, and other phenomena.

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American Psycho is a tragicomedy with elements of a thriller filmed by Mary Herron in 2000. It is based on the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. The film can be called a part of the golden era of American cinema, dating back to the '80s...

There are as many different and varied routes on the path to becoming a best-selling novelist as there are novels, stories and plots; Caroline Kepnes' path was not the traditional, well-worn one of academia, but a slightly more glitzy affair....

Angels & Insects : Two Novellas is really quite challenging reading because of its subject matter; set in Victorian England, it tells the story of an upper class household, proper and upright on the outside but embroiled in an incestuous...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey (published from 1816 to 1817) is Goethe's report on his travels to Italy from 1786 to 1788. Based on his diaries that he took during his long journey, Goethe spends much of the book ruminating on art,...

First delivered as a series of lectures, C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education with Special Reference To the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools is a famous book. Categorized by Amazon as a book in the Christian...

Nisei Daughter is the story of Monica Sone's experiences as a Japanese American in the 1920s and 1930s, growing up in Seattle, never really feeling that she fit in anywhere. It is also the story of the Japanese American experience in post-Pearl...

The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. At this time, Doris Lessing was moderately well known as a writer of novels and short stories; Notebook solidified her reputation. It was well regarded but somewhat controversial for its fragmented and...

In the late nineteen eighties, a magazine called New Woman hit the shelves in the U.K. Less political than empowering, the magazine positioned itself as a publication for women who were confident, independent, and perfectly capable of taking care...

"Bogland" appears in Seamus Heaney's second collection of poetry, Door Into The Dark (1969), which details Heaney's rural upbringing. "Bogland" is the final poem in the book, which is written with a great deal of attention devoted to evoking...