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"The Trial of an Ox for Killing a Man" is a chap book from the early 1830s. Chap books were cheaply printed, crudely decorated short booklets that were sold on the street to provide some easy reading for the everyday man. This specific book was...

Published in 2019, On the Come Up is a fictional teenage poverty novel that explores the life of an aspiring rapper who lives in a poor neighborhood and is perceived as a hoodlum by most of the people she knows. Her father, who was also a rapper,...

What is the difference between a political book and a political manifesto? Answer: absolutely nothing. This becomes abundantly evident in Bernie Sanders' book "Where We Go From Here" which reads more like a biography of a future presidential...

Shortest Way Home is a narrative by Pete Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend Indiana. The book, published in February 2019, details Buttigieg's views of what politics should be, which sharply contrast the controversial topics discussed in...

Published in 2014, The Sixth Extinction is a non-fiction book chronicling how humans have drastically changed the environment in which we live. With the combination of pollution and deforestation, we have destroyed the lives of so many animals and...

Published in 2018, New Dark Age is a novel examining the extent to which people have lost touch with reality due to the widespread introduction of technology. Bridle argues that most people believe knowledge of the world comes from a vast...

Depending upon whether you are reading the first or second printing of this collection of essays and short stories by renowned science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, you will be entertained, enthralled and often completely nauseated by either...

The Education of Henry Adams is Henry Adams' autobiography, originally published in 1918 upon his death (though Adams wrote the book earlier). It details not only Adams' life, but the history that unfolded around him, including the presidencies of...

Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers (2018) explores the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The novel follows a man named Yale Tishman, who works at an art gallery and is on the cusp of bringing a collection of extraordinary 1920s paintings and drawings...

Daniel Ellsberg was once a nuclear war planner and presidential advisor (as the title suggests). In The Doomsday Machine, published in 2017, Ellsberg provides an in-depth look at nuclear armaments in the world and how the U.S. uses it. Ellsberg...

Published in 1992 and written by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man is a book detailing the events after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. In his book, Fukuyama claims that this marks the end...

Amy Tan is best known for her novels and children's books, but she has also written several short stories, published both formally and informally. Her most popular short story is "Fish Cheeks", which is a true story published in 1987. The story...

All Our Relations is a 2018 non-fictional book examining the effects of past genocides on indigenous youth in North America. Recent studies have indicated that one out of three deaths among young indigenous people is due to suicide, likely because...

David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) tells the story of the sex lives of four people: two men (Dan Shapiro and Bernard Litko) and two women (Deborah Soloman and Joan Webber) as they try to successfully swing. The story is profane and...

The key to Nick Hornby's success as a novelist in his home country of Great Britain is the fact that he presents himself as an "ordinary bloke" and not, per se, an academic, or a writer-type, on in fact anybody but a fanatical soccer fan who got...

David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014) is based on the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the films screenplay). The film chronicles the story of Amy (played masterfully by Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (played by Ben Affleck) after...

Francois Begaudeau published his book Entre Les Murs in 2006; part autobiography, part fiction, it tells the story of the experiences of a literature teacher in a difficult junior high school in Paris' multi-cultural and often troubled inner city....

Controversial intellectual Christopher Hitchens called The Child In Time Ian McEwan's literary masterpiece. Like the majority of McEwan's work, it is both sombre and melancholy at its heart, and tells the story of children's book author Stephen...

A Treatise is a work of philosophy by George Berkeley, an Irish Empiricist. The work was published in 1710, and was an addition as well as refute to the philosophy of John Locke. In it, Berkeley argues that the outside world (the material world)...

"The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" is a literary buy-one-get-one as it combines two volumes, "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" and "Further Adventures of Nils". This is a style of writing popularized by early twentieth century children's author...

If you have never watched classic film noir "Black Narcissus" before, you could be forgiven for thinking, based on the title alone, that it is a psychological murder mystery about a serial killer whose nickname inspires the title of the movie. In...

Sarah Grand, born as Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in 1854 in Ireland, was a feminist writer and activist of English descent. Grand found little comfort or intellectual nourishment in the educational opportunities available to young women of...

By his contemporaries, George Barker was often described as a peculiar writer, who cannot be put into any specific box. His autobiography, written by Robert Fraser is fittingly called "The Chameleon Poet". While he is often associated with the...

The Cartographer is a highly themed book of poetry written by Kei Miller and published in 2014. The book follows the story of a cartographer (one who makes maps) that tries to find a religious city by mapping his way to it. As a Rastaman (a member...