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Clifford's Blues is a 1999 historical fiction novel by John Alfred Williams. Williams is considered one of the "founding members of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s." Like Williams' other novels, Clifford's Blues is told through the...

“For the Union Dead” is the titular poem of Robert Lowell’s sixth book of poetry. This poem was commissioned by the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 and ended up in some paperback editions of Life Studies. It builds a shaky bridge between the present...

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is a history book written by Jack Weatherford, originally published in 2004. At 352 pages, it gives an alternate perspective to the Mongol dynasty and their leader, Genghis Khan. It follows Khan’s...

This 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho is based on the Le Transperceneige, a French graphic novel by Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer was Bong Joon-ho's first English film, after directing numerous critically-acclaimed Korean films. The film stars Chris...

Richard Church, born in 1893, was a novelist, poet, and writer of several autobiographies. Born in southeast of London, Church was quite fond of country-style living, and this is shown in many of his poems. Church also contributed to several...

Shutter Island is a thriller written in 2003 by Dennis Lehane. Set in the summer of 1954, with memories of World War Two still fresh, the novel follows U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels as he travels to Shutter Island, the location of Ashecliffe Hospital...

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic is journalist and author Sam Quinones' 2015 non-fiction book that explores why there is an opiate epidemic in America. Quinones' traces it back to enterprising sugar farmers who developed a...

Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the debut novel of author Becky Albertalli, was published in 2015. The novel follows the story of Simon Spier, who is a high school boy insecure about his gayness. Throughout this coming-of-age novel, Simon must...

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was written by Jeff Hobbs. It was publish in September 2014 by Scribner. Jeff Hobbs comes from Pennsylvania. He has a degree from Yale University in English Language and Literature. He graduated from Yale...

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains was written by English author and essayist Nicholas Carr. Published in 2010, the book seems to expand upon the original ideas presented by Carr in his essay entitled, "Is Google Making Us...

Famed children’s author Linda Sue Park published A Long Walk to Water in 2010. Based on the true story of Salva Dut, a Sudanese “Lost Boy,” it interweaves the tales of Dut with those of a fictional young girl named Nya. Dut’s story takes place in...

The Sphinx Without a Secret and Other Stories is a collection of stories written by Oscar Wilde. The stories are all comical and mysterious. The single tales were originally published in 1887 by a magazine called “The Court and Society Review” and...

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin is the biography of naturalist Charles Darwin, written by Darwin himself from late May 1876 to early August of the same year. Over the course of the book, Darwin reminisces over his career from the landmark On...

Kim Scott is not just one of Australia's pre-eminent authors; he is also one of the best known indigenous authors, a descendant of the Noongar Aborigines of Western Australia. The name "Noongar" does not refer to a specific group of aboriginal...

Pather Panchali was inspired by filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s desire to create more realistic films with actual locations and natural actors about real Indian issues. While traveling in London, Ray saw Bicycle Thieves, an Italian film directed by...

The Shadow of the Wind is a Spanish language book that was published in 2001 that became a worldwide hit after its translation into English by Lucia Graves in 2004. Graves is one of the most renowned translators of Spanish into English in the...

Most authors, when interviewed, will tell you that they wrote their book because creativity had been bubbling up inside them since childhood, and they had always known there was a novel within just struggling to get out. Others will tell you that...

Sarah’s Key is a young adult historical fiction novel about the holocaust written by Tatiana de Rosnay. Its original language is French, and it was released under the title “Elle s’appelait Sarah” which can be directly translated to “She was...

Aldo Leopold was an American author, ecologist, scientist and philosopher - areas of expertise that at first glance seem oppositional, to say the least. His main passion was environmentalism; A Sand County Almanac is his best-known work and has...

Turtles All the Way Down is entrepreneur and author John Green's 2017 follow-up to his 2012 smash-hit The Fault in Our Stars. In the book, we follow a high school student named Aza Holmes. She is wicked smart but struggles with mental health—...

Zoe Wicomb, an author with both South African and Scottish ancestry, lives and works in Scotland, something that she shares with the protagonist of this novel, Marcia Murray. Murray is a professor in Glasgow who returns to her homeland of South...

“Sonnet 24: Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is part of her collection of poems entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband,...

Thérèse Desqueyroux is a novel written by the famous French author François Mauriac. The book was first published in 1927, and later became included in the Grand Prix of the best novels of the half-century in 1950. Mauriac died at the age of 84 in...

Alex Kotlowitz's biography, There Are No Children Here, was the recipient of The Christopher Award, and the Helen Bernstein Award, and tells the story of a childhood spent in a housing project in Chicago, at the Henry Horner Homes. Like many kids...