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Top Gun is an iconic American action film, remembered for propelling Tom Cruise into the public eye and Hollywood stardom. While it did not fare that well with critics, it was a big hit at the box office and was lauded for its special effects and...

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is widely considered one of the most ambitious and profoundly moving plays of the late 20th century, earning the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and a place in Harold Bloom’s Western canon (interestingly,...

The Royal Tenenbaums was written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson and released in 2001 to great acclaim. His third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, follows the development of the three gifted but troubled Tenenbaum children, and their reunion with their...

Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent in 1907 and the work is often taken to be the major work in a trilogy of political works that Conrad published around this time (the other two are Nostromo and Under Western Eyes). The book is also taken to...

The Canterville Ghost was first published in 1887 in The Court and Society Review. The first part was published on February 23, with the second installment following on March 2. It was accompanied by illustrations. By 1887, Wilde had achieved a...

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 film created by idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson. The film is loosely inspired by the literature of early 20th century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Director and co-writer Anderson had never even heard of...

M is one of the high watermarks of Fritz Lang's career, and more broadly of German cinema from the Weimar era between World Wars I and II. Co-written by the director Fritz Lang and his wife Tea von Harbou, M traces the story of a child murderer,...

Edward Albee's The American Dream is a one-act play that premiered at the York Playhouse in 1961. It satirizes American family dynamics in the 1960s, blending elements of the absurd with "kitchen sink" realism. Kitchen sink realism was developed...

Fifth Business is a novel by the famed Canadian author, playwright and professor Robertson Davies. Published in 1970, it is the first work in his Deptford Trilogy.

The novel follows the life of its narrator and protagonist, Dunstan Ramsey, and...

John and Elizabeth Sherrill, two American Christian authors, first heard about Corrie ten Boom while writing another book, “God’s Smugglers.” The subject of the biography, Brother Andrew, had travelled with Corrie during mission trips to Vietnam....

Dandelion Wine is a novel first published in 1957 by Ray Bradbury, an American writer famous for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Throughout his long career he was awarded many prizes, including the 2004 National Medal of...

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times tells the story of Chaplin's iconic Little Tramp as he struggles to survive in a newly modernized world. The Tramp starts out working at a factory on an assembly line, but the new technology and oppressive...

A Marvel superhero movie produced and distributed by Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Black Panther was written and directed by Ryan Coogler. The film, released on February 16, 2018, was an instant hit with viewers, raking in over a billion dollars at...

In the post-9/11 media landscape, Crash’s backstory has garnered nearly as much attention as the plot itself. After personally experiencing a carjacking in 1991, television writer Paul Haggis was inspired to pen this story about social and racial...

In the 1940s and 50s, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as "The Archers," wrote, directed, and produced a litany of films that are now considered classics. Contrary to the typical Hollywood studio arrangement at the time,...

Wu Ch’eng-en, a Confucian scholar and well-respected literary poet, wrote Monkey during the Ming dynasty. This makes it all the more surprising that Monkey was written in the vernacular -- plain, simple language -- during a time period that...

The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in...

Published in 1988, A Small Place is a novel by Jamaica Kincaid. It is set in Antigua, the island where she was born and raised before she came to the United States at her mother's wish. The book was critically well-received, although also mildly...

Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie" in the original German) is a cornerstone of existentialist writing which centers on themes of religion, colonialism, and torture. It is notable for its flat, unaffected tone, with a...

Democracy in America, is a firsthand sociopolitical observation of the United States written by French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. The author documents his travels through America and contrasts his experiences with established...

What if the Allies hadn't won the Second World War? What if the conquering Japanese and German armies divided up the United States?

In The Man in the High Castle, Dick explores the chain of events that would cause such a state of affairs, and what...

The Lightning Thief is a fantasy-adventure novel by Rick Riordan. It is the first of five novels in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. It is followed by The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last...

Lady Audley's Secret was first published in serial form, meaning it appeared in short installments at regular intervals rather than all at once. This method of publishing, which was common in the Victorian period, suited works that were dramatic...

Crossed, the second book of Ally Condie's Matched trilogy, is a young adult, dystopian, romance novel featuring Cassia Reyes and Ky Markham as protagonists. The book details Cassia and Ky's fight to reunite after forced estrangement at the hands...