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Reading Teju Cole's debut novel Open City is really not like reading a novel at all; it is more like reading a journal or a travelogue written for the writer to look back on themselves and use as an aide memoir when wanting to go back over a trip...

Shreds of Tenderness is a 2001 play by Ugandan playwright John Ruganda. It explores themes of greed, individualism, and betrayal on a familial and national level and features conflict over everything from crops to political power.

The play takes...

Gurinder Chadha's Bridge and Prejudice (released in the United Kingdom in 2004 and the United States in 2005) is a Bollywood-style remake of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice. The film follows four unmarried daughters in an Indian family....

Widely renowned as one of the greatest writers of our modern era, Haruki Murakami wrote After the Quake after the catastrophic Kobe earthquake in 1995. The collection of short stories was first published in Japan in 2000, with an English...

Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a freelance reporter who is recording the violent events taking place in the middle of the night in downtown Los Angeles, and sending them to the local television news station. He is an ambulance chaser,...

In 1995, Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton first worked together in the blockbuster smash Apollo 13, but despite the movie's success, and the two actors' obvious on-screen compatibility, they did not work together again for another twenty two years, when...

“Sure Thing” is a short romantic comedy written by the American playwright David Ives. It debuted at Manhattan Punch Line’s Festival of One-Act Comedies in 1988. This play was one part of Ives’ collection of six short plays called All in the...

T2 Trainspotting (2017) is the sequel to 1996's smash-hit Trainspotting (which made $72 million against a budget of only $1.7 million). It stars many of the actors from the first film (like Ewan McGregor, who reprised his role as Mark Renton) and...

West Side Story is the 1961 film adaptation of the wildly successful stage musical which had taken Broadway by storm just a few years earlier. The film was co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, who made history by becoming the first pair...

In 1960, French author Albert Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident. Prior to his death, Camus published a number of great works like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He was also working a brand new novel entitled The First Man,...

Nathaniel Hawthorn owes the writing of his last novel, The Marble Faun, to the fact that Franklin Pierce was such an incompetent President that even today, more than 150 years and 30 contenders later, he still consistently ranks among the five...

Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was a satirical political film produced, directed, written , starring, and scored by the famed British actor and comedian, Charlie Chaplin. The film makes fun of the Nazi Regime in Germany, which was at its...

Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son,...

J.D. Salinger is best known for the coming-of-angst novel The Catcher In The Rye, but he is also revered and respected as one of America's pre-eminent writers of short stories as well. His career as a short story writer began when he was still in...

Sometimes it is necessary to have another income source when one is first thinking about becoming a poet. Such was life for American poet and essayist Dana Gioia, who spent the first fifteen years of his writing career penning feverishly at night...

Included in Tobias Wolff's book Back in the World are ten stories (ranging from "The Missing Person" to "The Rich Brother") which cover rather normal people in abnormal situations. In one story, a kind and gentle priest finds himself in a Las...

“The Wife of His Youth” (1898) was Charles W. Chesnutt’s proclamation of the death of the plantation myth of the black man as defined and constructed by the dialect tales, stories which appealed primarily to white readers. Chesnutt had found...

“The Altar” is a pattern poem, also known as a “hieroglyphic” poem. These are poems shaped like the thing they describe: in this case, an altar. The first known pattern poems were written in Ancient Greek between 325 BCE and 200 CE. While other...

Published in 2003, Private Peaceful is a young-adult novel by English author Michael Morpurgo, notable for his children's book War Horse. The book is written from the perspective of a soldier discussing his life experiences both before and during...

Not to be confused with the Laurel and Hardy movie of the same name that was released six years previously, Leo McCarey's Duck Soup was the last of five Marx Brothers movies to be released by Paramount Studios. It also marked the ending of the...

The Accidental Tourist is a novel written by the American author Anne Tyler in 1985. The novel revolves around a protagonist named Macon Leary, a middle-aged writer of travel guides. Macon and his wife of 20 years, Sarah, struggle to maintain...

The speed of Wendelin Van Draanen's prose is extremely quick, and mirrors the speed around the track of her protagonist, sixteen year old Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star who loses a leg when her track team's bus collides with a car...

"The Darling" is a short story by Anton Chekhov, written in December 1898. First published in The Family magazine, it was ultimately included in the nine volume of Chekhov's work, released by book publisher Adolph Marx. The story draws from...

In 1862, during his Presidency, Abraham Lincoln's beloved son, Willie, passed away, and was interred in the crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. The President was consumed by grief, and had been known to go into the...