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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...

Station Eleven is a critically acclaimed 2015 novel by up-and-coming author Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven was a National Book Award Finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist. The novel was listed as one of the best books of the year by...

J. M. Coetzee retells a familiar story in Foe yet challenges that very familiarity. Even people who have never read the novel Robinson Crusoe are relatively well acquainted with its iconic portrait of survival after a shipwreck, as well as with...

The original winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize before the award was refused by the author, Arrowsmith is a 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The book covers the topic of science culture, specifically the medical field, during the period.

The...

While Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are both far better known, a sizable contingent of scholars and critics regard the masterpiece of Joseph Conrad’s fecund writing career to be the novel Nostromo. Among its admirers is the author of The Great...

Njal's Saga is the longest and the most revered of the forty family sagas written in Iceland between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The events of the saga come from several different sources, including oral tales, The Book of Settlements...

If the correspondence was useful for no other purpose alone, reading the letters which passed between John Adams and his wife Abigail might qualify as the smoking gun in a trial to convict social media of killing the fine art of political...

Perhaps more famous for novels like Women in Love and short stories like “The Rocking Horse Winner” D.H. Lawrence is also a major figure in British poetry. Lawrence was highly influenced by the American poet Walt Whitman and, in fact, would often...