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The first type of writing that comes to mind you hear the name Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably not poetry. After all, Emerson’s towering stature in American letters is primarily derived from his essays. Therefore it should not be at all surprising...

American novelist Louisa May Alcott produced her 1866 novella Behind a Mask under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. Living in a discriminatory era, and writing for a partial society which favored Men authors over their female counterparts, adopting a...

The Phantom Tollbooth is a children's book written in 1961 by Norton Juster, an architect with a passion for planning, order, and, especially, maps. Basing the main character, Milo, on himself, Juster created an adventure story filled with...

Directed by relative newcomer Barry Jenkins, Moonlight is a film adapted from Terell Alvin McCraney’s play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Production on the film, financed by A24, PASTEL, and Plan B, began in late 2015; the film was released...

Anton Chekhov devoted several of his stories to the lives of ordinary people; in some famous cases, he focused specifically on unknown, obscure, and miserable individuals. One such poignant work is "Vanka," the story of a lonely peasant boy who...

A New York-born comic artist, James Sturm's 'America: God, Gold and Golems' is a series of three graphic stories first published in 2007. Each story explores less well-known aspects of American history: 'The Revival' is set during the religious...

The Moor's Last Sigh is a historical fiction novel by Salman Rushdie. This novel is his fifth novel and was published in 1995. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian author and a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature. In France, he got the...

Many do not know of Kurt Wimmer's 2002 cult classic film Equilbrium. It tells the story of a futuristic world in all conflict, especially war, has been eliminated through the use of an insidious drug known as Prozium that inhibits emotion of all...

The Tripitaka, also known as Pipitaka, is the earliest collection of Buddhist writings. Initially these writings were composed orally and passed down by traditional teaching and re-telling. By the Third Century B.C., they were written in the...

Harriet The Spy is a children's novel written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh. Published in 1964, it was an immediate hit and has been called a classic, appearing on three national lists of the best children's novels of all time.

The novel...

The Homecoming is one of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s most compelling and critically acclaimed plays. Disturbing, enigmatic, and darkly comic, it has been staged continually since its 1965 debut. Pinter’s own words in 1970 when accepting the...

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is a vastly influential Modernist poem by Wallace Stevens. It was first printed in October 1917 in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, and then in Stevens' groundbreaking first book, Harmonium. The poem...

The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's autobiography, written during her time at Radcliffe College and published when she was 22 years old. It details her life from birth to age 21, beginning with an account of her family's home in Alabama and the...

Published in 1989, I for Isobel follows a thoughtful young woman named Isobel Callaghan as she deals with family conflict, personal independence, and the awakening of her literary ambitions. This short, incisive novel is the defining work of...

Jean Toomer’s Cane is one of the most influential works in the history of African-American literature. A “literary work” is truly the most appropriate term for Cane, certainly more appropriate than “novel.” Cane is comprised of sketches written in...

July's People, published in 1981 by Nadine Gordimer, is set during a counterfactual revolutionary civil war in South Africa, in which black South Africans rise up and overthrow their white oppressors, with the aid of neighboring African nations....

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer's third novel, adapted from an article he published in Outside magazine following the tragic events of May 1996 on the slopes of Mt. Everest. At the time of its publication in 1997, Into Thin Air garnered widespread...

The Breaks is the fourth novel by American author and screenwriter Richard Price. The story was published on 1983. Price wrote several novels and has been writing scripts for tv shows until now.

The novel narrates the story of a graduate student,...

Oscar Wilde published a volume of verse with the simplest and most direct of all possible titles: Poems. The opening poem of that collection features a title that is anything but simple and direct. In fact, were it not for the exclamation point...

Oscar Wilde was a Victorian iconoclast who stood at the vanguard of the aesthetic movement. His works, from his Comedy of Manners plays to his verse compositions such as "Requiescat," have changed the landscape of literature since the late 1800s....

Raymond Carver died in 1988 at the tragically early age of 50. Almost unique among American writers inhabiting his sphere of fame and influence, Carver never published a novel. His reputation as one of the foremost chroniclers of 20th century life...

Three Day Road is author Joseph Boyden's debut novel, published in 2005 to critical and commercial approval. The novel was inspired in part by the war stories Boyden heard growing up, from both his father (a World War II veteran) and his...

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is Modernist poet Wallace Stevens at his most whimsical, and his most notoriously evasive. Originally published in 1922, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” was included in Stevens’ 1923 debut collection, Harmonium. This poem...

Outcasts United is a book published in 2009 by author and journalist Warren St. John.

The book tackles contemporary issues faced by refugees, especially those from Africa and the Middle East, who have been placed in the United States. The book...