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It doesn’t get much more definitively Chicano for an American writer than to be born and raised in East L.A. Just that very term “East L.A.” has the ability—thanks to pop culture portrayals in the media—to conjure up images of Hispanic culture...

Persepolis 2 is the second novel written by Marjane Satrapi. It is the second of the set of her memoir and autobiography. The book contains drawings and graphics. Satrapi is a French girl born in Iran and witnessed the Islamic Revolution. She...

Don DeLillo is an American author born on November 20, 1936 in New York City. During his childhood, DeLillo was not interested in writing, but his apathy toward literature changed when he took on a job as a parking attendant. The work was so...

A source of controversy as much today as it was when it was first published in 2001, Michel Vinaver's play '11 september 2001/11 September 2001' focuses on the tragic events of that fateful day, which saw the attack by terrorists on the World...

The Last Unicorn is a fantasy novel written by the American author Peter Beagle. Published in 1968, the novel had a short novelette following it, Two Hearts. The novel, originally published by Viking Press, is about a unicorn that believes there...

“Mapping the Margins” is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic article explaining and applying her concept of “intersectionality.” The article was an important articulation of Black feminist thought, showing how antiracist and feminist activism failed women...

The Red Pony a novel comprised of four separate short stories sharing character and setting and essentially the same period, but which do not connect smoothly to each other in the fashion of chapters in a traditional novel.

The four stories which...

The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel written by Jack London and published in 1908. What, you may ask, is a dystopian novel? It is actually a cautionary tale; a dystopian novel pains a picture of an initially idealized futuristic society that becomes...

If you wake up in hospital with not knowing how you arrived there and the events of the previous month are a complete and absolute mystery, you could be forgiven for thinking that you have recently enjoyed the mother of all alcoholic binges, or at...

Hawksmoor is a mystery novel written by the English author Peter Ackroyd. It was first published in 1985. Ackroyd's work mostly covers a societal issue or historical recaps. He won many awards for his literary works. Hawksmoor mainly narrates the...

The Wretched of the Earth is Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1961 book, originally published in French, about the effects of colonization on the minds of the colonized, and the efforts by the colonized to overthrow the colonizers. It draws from Fanon’s own...

The Sociological Imagination is C. Wright Mills’s 1959 statement about what social science should be and the good it can produce. In this way, it is a polemical book. It has a vision for sociology, and it criticizes those with a different vision....

Across The Nightingale Floor is the first novel in Liann Hearn's "Tales of the Otori" Trilogy. It was first published in 2002. It is set in a fictional feudal system and tells the story of a fifteen year old girl named Kaede and a sixteen year old...

Rumble Young Man Rumble is a 2014 novel by Dante Zuniga-West. It centers around a young man, Quinton, who becomes disillusioned with his life and joins a group of aspiring Muay-Thai fighters.

The story revolves around Quinton, a young man who...

The Middleman and Other Stories is a collection of stories by Bharati Mukherjee published in 1988. The stories vary in length but all of them are fairly short. As the title implies the first story is called The Middleman. There are eleven stories...

Annie Dillard is an American writer born on April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her autobiography entitled An American Childhood (1987) thoroughly details her childhood during which she was heavily inspired by the creativity of her...

The Invention of Wings is a historical fiction novel written by Sue Monk Kidd. It was published on January 7, 2014. Kidd is an American author, and the author of the celebrated book The Secret Life of Bees.The novel talks about a girl called Sarah...

This disturbing chronicle of the eight-week period spanning April and May of 1945, during the Russian invasion of Berlin, was first published in 1953 and then promptly vanished, not re-surfacing again until it was re-published in Germany some...

Warren Buffett is one of those rare things; an almost impossibly successful investor with a Midas touch and an Everyman appeal that keeps him accessible and therefore inspirational to the average investor, or wannabe investor. He is an investor,...

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915. During the 1930’s he was working for the communist cause, in 1941 he became a Trappist monk in Kentucky and he published his first collection of verse, Thirty Poems, in 1944. By the time of his death in...

The Confusions of Young Torless is a fiction novel written by Robert Musil. It was first published in 1906. Robert Musil is an Austrian writer who has written several books, and one of the most important of his was The Man Without Qualities, which...

The Hoover Institution states that Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" is "the starting point for any serious study of the First World War." It not only details the events but shows the complex connections and political relationships that led...

Black Skin, White Masks is Frantz Fanon’s classic statement on the psychological experience of Black men and women in societies dominated by white people, especially France. It draws from his personal experience as a man born in the Caribbean...

When Alfred Hitchcock released Vertigo in 1958, it was met with ambivalence and near rejection by critics and audiences. Vertigo defied easy categorization and explored themes related to sexual perversity, erotic obsession and a shifting...