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This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is a work of historical fiction published in 1947. It is a collection of short stories written by the Polish author Tadeusz Borowski. Borowski was a writer and journalist and started working on the...

Wilkie Collins found the inspiration for The Woman in White from a French book entitled Recueil des causes célèbres. In this book, there is a story of a French widow who is drugged by her brother and then imprisoned in a mental asylum under a...

Testament of Youth is the first book in the overall memoir of Vera Brittain, an English nurse, writer, and pacifist. It covers her earlier life from 1900-1925, working as a nurse during the First World War.

In Testament of Youth, Brittain...

Written by Spanish Nobel Prize laureate Camilo Jose Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte is a novel revolving around "tremendismo", a style of writing which focuses on the characters' pain and suffering. Met with public backlash, the first few...

I Served the King of England is a 1971 novel written by Bohumil Hrabal. Written during a period of intense censorship, the book was not officially published until the 1980's. It remains an important piece of Czech literature, and was adapted into...

Morgan Spurlock set out to eat McDonald's food three times a day for 30 days. His choice in doing so is based on the increase in obesity in Americans which has spread to a level considered to now be an epidemic. Spurlock also wanted to find proof...

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy/drama film directed by Mike Nichols, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb. The story revolves around Benjamin Braddock, played in a star-making turn by a young Dustin Hoffman, who enters...

Audiences had modest expectations for Taxi Driver when it was first released in the winter of 1976. A low-budget film directed by a not-particularly-well-known Martin Scorsese and starring the young Robert De Niro, who had recently won an Oscar...

"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a philosophical poem about the creative powers of the human mind, by American modernist Wallace Stevens. It is the title poem and most famous work from Stevens' second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, published...

"Of Modern Poetry" is a poem by Wallace Stevens published in 1942, in his collection Parts of a World. The poem acts as a highly self-referential manifesto on the purpose of modern poetry, and the role of the poet.

This poem marks a noticeable...

Mac Flecknoe is one of the four major satires of esteemed English poet John Dryden. The poem is personal satire that has for its target Thomas Shadwell, another poet who had offended Dryden with his aesthetic and political leanings. It is also...

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It was directed by John Huston and was his directorial debut. The film follows the story of a San Francisco private detective named Sam Spade (played...

"Sweat" is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1926. Hurston was "a product of the Harlem Renaissance," an African-American political and artistic movement that took place in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, "as well as one of its most...

The Shack is a work of Christian fiction published by William Paul Young in 2007. The novel tells the story of Mack, a man whose daughter has been abducted by a serial killer, meeting God face to face and spending a weekend in a shack in the woods...

The Tain is actually the abbreviated title of the Irish legend of Tain Bo Cuailnge, or The Cattle Raid Of Cooley. It is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of Irish literature and it is considered an epic despite the fact that it is...

Love and Vertigo is a novel by Malaysian-born Australian novelist Hsu-Ming Teo. It was published in 2000 and was the recipient of the Australian Vogel's Literary Award.

The plot of Love and Vertigo revolves around a young Australian woman named...

Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film The Great Gatsby is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name. The novel is a classic, taught almost universally in high school English classes and touted as one of the most important works of American...

A classic of 20th-century literature, The Once and Future King is based loosely on the epic Middle French poem Le Mort d'Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century. Malory's text chronicles the early life, career, and death of the...

All Creatures Great and Small is a novel written by James Herriot, the pen name for James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight. It is the first book in a series, followed by the novels: All Things Bright and Beautiful (1972), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977), ...

The Iceman Cometh is often deemed Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus. It is a towering, profound, and lengthy work that manages to conjure up the universal and existential amidst the conversations of bums, derelicts, and dreamers at a rundown bar in...

Alien (1979) is a highly regarded and influential film in the Thriller/Science Fiction/Horror genres. The film was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. Ridley Scott also had been the director of the well-received film The...

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge is Michel Foucault’s landmark 1978 study, originally published in French, of the historical and political circumstances under which sexuality, as we know it, was formed. The book largely...

The Haunting of Hill House is considered Shirley Jackson’s best work and perhaps the quintessential haunted house novel. A delicate but insidious mediation on the feminine, the supernatural, psychological trauma, and the oppression of family and...

Dr. Strangelove was written and produced at the height of the Cold War, amidst such escalations as the Berlin Crisis (the closing of the border between Soviet East Berlin and democratic West Berlin) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (the establishment...