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Black Dog of Fate (An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past) was written by and tells the story of Peter Balakian. This book was first published during 1997 and was later published again during 1998 by Broadway. Balakian explores the unsettling...

Terrorist (2006) is a novel written by revered American author John Updike. Although Updike's novels are all set in diverse towns across America and feature an equally diverse group of characters, the common thread that stitches all of his writing...

The Tempest is a film directed by Julie Taymor and released in 2010. It is based on the play The Tempest, written by William Shakespeare, but the protagonist, Prospero, is changed from a man to a woman. (The name change from "Prospero" to...

If the most unusual movie had to picked out of every movie ever produced, the movie selected may well be Spike Jonze's quirky Being John Malkovich. The film follows a struggling puppeteer, Craig Schwartz, who discovers a portal on floor 7 of an...

John Updike won the 1964 National Book Award for his third novel, The Centaur. The strangely compelling mixture of contemporary 1947 Pennsylvania and ancient Greek mythological figures like Chiron, Prometheus, Venus and Zeus enticed some critics...

Devil in the Grove is a nonfiction account of a 1949 court case involving the Groveland Boys, who were accused of rape by a 17 year-old Caucasian-American. The book was published in 2012 by American writer Gilbert King. The book is set in Florida...

The Cement Garden is Ian McEwan's 1978 novel that explores complex themes of maturing, family, and dealing with loss. The novel follows Jack, the narrator, and his siblings, as they attempt to grow up without having parents. The novel is...

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the most famous spy novels ever written and one of the most influential. John le Carre published his novel just as the modestly successful James Bond series by Ian Fleming was about to become a global...

“The Fish” is an oft-anthologized and -studied work, and is usually considered one of Moore’s finest poems. It was first published in 1918 in The Egoist, then slightly revised and included in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others for 1919: An Anthology of New...

As a child, White found complete happiness during summers in the Belgrade Lakes in Maine and this love of nature, which lasted his whole life, inspired all three of his children’s books. His first, Stuart Little took White about eighteen years to...

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, a Japanese writer from the Taisho period in Japan, was considered the “Father of the Japanese short story”. He wrote a number of beautiful, concise short stories that explored diverse themes with an intricate understanding of...

T.C. Boyle—often found under his name T Coraghessan Boyle—is almost certainly known to most readers of short fiction through his short story “Greasy Lake.” That coming-of-age story that combines humor with terror without any elements of horror is...

Published in 1994, Gardening in the Tropics was the second book of poetry by Olive Senior. The book is a sequence of twelve poems that all begin with the book’s title as their opening line which sets the stage for each individual work of verse to...

When Eavan Boland began her career as a published poet in 1967 with the collection New Territory, the mixed reviews from critics hardly indicated that that career would go on to situate her as the vanguard of contemporary Irish verse. Since the...

With the 1986 publication of her third volume of verse, Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove was elevated into that most exclusive sphere of American poets: those singled out for distinction with the honor of a Pulitzer Prize. Thomas and Beulah is a...

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism was begun by bell hooks (lowercase intentional by the author's convention) when she was just 19 years old. At the time, she was not only attending Stanford full-time, but also working as a phone operator....

Mister Pip, written by Lloyd Jones, was published in 2006. It is to some extent a response to the character Pip from the novel Great Expectations. It takes place in the Pacific and is set during the civil war on Bougainville Island.

Matilda is a...

Of the fifty-eight stories that make up North Carolina's most famous author Thomas Wolfe's short story collection, (which spans the peak of the author's career), the most important and popular are such stories as "The Train and the City" and "The...

"The Story of the Treasure Seekers" is a children's novel written by British novelist Edith (E.) Nesbit, and like her other much-loved novels including "The Phoenix and the Carpet" and "Five Children and It", "The Story of the Treasure Seekers" is...

Ian Bone is an Australian novelist born in 1956 in Geelong, Victoria. He possesses a PhD from Adelaide University and works as an English professor. His foray into the realm of young adult fiction began in 1998 with the release of his book...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) imagines Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two minor courtiers. In Stoppard's revision, the characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are not fully developed in the original play, fumble...

Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji is universally regarded as the finest literary work to come out of medieval Japan. Although published around 1000 A.D., the text would not be translated into English until the second quarter of the 20th...

Published in 1983, A Gathering of Old Men is the fifth novel from plantation-born African-American writer Ernest J. Gaines. Perhaps most famous for writing The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the author here focuses not only on the masculine...

In the Afterlight is the third book in the trilogy The Darkest Minds, written by Alexandra Bracken, published in 2014. It delves deep into the intriguing story of Ruby, and her fight to save the children of America. The government has set off a...