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The Short Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson, better known as Skin Folk, is a 2001 collection of short stories by Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson's stories draw mostly from the science fiction and fantasy genres and feature aspects...

Survivors Club is a non-fiction book by Michael and Debbie Bornstein. Michael, the child in color on the front photograph of the book, was able to survive a horrible life at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. In this book, Michael details the...

In 1932, a German woman by the name of Margaret Schwartzkopf, was the guest of Mary Elizabeth Frye, in Baltimore. She was worried about her mother back in Germany, who was ill, but she was unable to go home to see her because of the increasingly...

Lydia Davis is an American writer and translator. Davis was born in 1947 and grew up in a very intellectual environment as the daughter of Hope Hale Davis, an American feminist and writer and Robert Gorham David, a university professor. She has...

Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (first published in 1959) tells the story of the eponymous Duddy Kravitz, a smart, sassy, and scheming hustler who spends most of his day going to school at a local Jewish academy and working...

A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines's eighth book, and is in some ways his most autobiographical. Many aspects of the novel are drawn from Gaines's personal experiences growing up in Oscar, Louisiana. For example, the plantation school where...

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of two novels written by John Kennedy Toole, the other being The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16. Neither book was published during Toole's lifetime. Following Toole's suicide, his mother sought out author...

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is based on Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel of the same name. The title comes from the Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange", which means "very queer indeed (the meaning can be, but isn't necessarily,...

The title, A Burnt-Out Case, refers to a condition identified by Doctor Colin in the novel: some lepers develop severe psychological numbness as a result of their disease. Even after they are cured and cease to feel the pain of their condition,...

This selection of stories includes John Updike's most popular and critically debated short works. "Ace in the Hole," "A & P," and "Pigeon Feathers" are all characteristic of Updike's early style; indeed, 1953's "Ace" was the 21-year-old...

First published in 1922, Babbitt is set during the 1920s (the Jazz Age), the period in America following World War I that is considered especially materialistic and spiritually depraved. Politically, the country was charged with fear due to the...

Sir William Golding composed Lord of the Flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the novel's composition, Golding, who had published an anthology of poetry nearly two decades earlier, had been working for a number of years as a teacher...

Mark Twain is one of the most famous figures in American literature, and is known for his novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What is not as widely known about him is the surprising amount of essays...

Released in 1988, Mississippi Burning is a crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker. Though released in the late 1980's, it features some of America's touchiest Civil Right's Era topics - a disappearance of three civil rights activists is met...

“Sunny Prestatyn” is one of the poems in Philip Larkin’s poetry volume called The Whitsun Weddings, which is a collection of 32 poems published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber. The poem was believed to be first published in 1964, though...

“The Whitsun Weddings,” the titular poem of a book by the same name, is perhaps the most-discussed poem by Philip Larkin, known as England’s ‘poet laureate of disappointment.’ With eight stanzas of ten lines each, rhyming like Keatsian odes but...

Three Sisters is a play written by Anton Chekhov in 1900. It follows the lives of the Prozorov sisters as their fortune is in decline and they must seek out a happy life against the odds. The play traces various human disappointments, specifically...

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet whose work has risen in prominence since some of her verse was featured in the singer Beyoncé's film Lemonade, released in 2016. Her debut collection—entitled teaching my mother how to give birth—was well...

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book written by Frederick Brooks about Software project management. It was published by Addison-Wesley in 1975 and was re-published in 1982 and 1995. It is the first book in a planned...

The Valley of Amazement is a novel of two halves: the first, written from the point of view of Violet, the abandoned daughter of a courtesan house owner mother who abruptly leaves Shanghai to fly to San Francisco where she is able at last to meet...

Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with some elements of the novel that followed, Through the Looking Glass, serving as additional inspiration. In Alice's...

Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) takes place in 1931 and follows three girls who live in Australia near the so-called rabbit-proof fence. The town is called Jigalong and the girls are half-Aboriginal; they initially follow a traditional...

Ross Gay is a prolific young writer that gained prominence in the poetic circles of America. He published several books and recently started teaching at the University of Indiana. He is further known for his outspoken opinions on social...

Malone Dies was first published in French in 1951 under the title Malone Meurt. Samuel Beckett the author of the novel native to Ireland, later translated the book into English so that it could reach a wider audience. Malone Dies is the second of...