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The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the first novel by American-Vietnamese author Le Thi Diem Thuy. It was published by Knopf in 2003. Before being published as a novel of its own, it was published in The Best American Essays of 1997.

After it...

Edna St. Vincent Millay is the very definition of the poet as rebel. At least as much Shelley and maybe even more than Keats, Millay fully inhabits the role of the writer in society as the caretaker of its continued progression forward. She was a...

Jurassic Park is a science fiction novel written by Michael Crichton in 1990. Originally intended as a screenplay, Crichton began Jurassic Park in 1983 about a university student who recreates a dinosaur. Given the financial resources that would...

Colin Teevan’s How Many Miles to Basra? was originally commissioned as a radio drama by BBC3 and initially broadcast on July 11, 2004. The first stage performance of the play was produced in September 2006 by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds....

Jim Wallis is an American novelist, theologian, and political commentator born in Detroit, Michigan on June 4, 1948. As a teenager, he was heavily involved in local government, participating in Students for a Democratic Society as well as the...

Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939) is an author from Ghana. His contributions to literature include novels, essays, poetry, short stories, and even children's books. Primarily concerned with racism and prejudice, Armah's personal life becomes intertwined...

Marley and Me is an autobiographical novel written by John Grogan and published in 2005. The novel reveals of the narrator’s life within 13 years. During these years, he and his wife have been through a lot, but what is so distinctive of the...

Brideshead Revisited (The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder) was authored by Evelyn Waugh. It was first published during 1945 and was published again during 1982 by Back Bay Books. This novel delves into the life of Charles...

Out Stealing Horses (originally titled “Ut og stjæle hester”) is a novel written by Per Petterson in 2003. Originally written and published in Norwegian, it was translated into English in 2005 and published in the US in 2007. It follows the story...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet (born in Suva, Fiji) who created two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill which won the Somerset Maugham Award. Born on September 20, 1974, he has written several books, plays, and poems. He is known for...

In the height of the Cold War, a Polish author by the name of Stanislaw Lem (pronounced: stah-nis-wahv lem) was working feverishly publishing short science fiction works rapidly. He became something of a superstar in the realm of science fiction...

Solaris was first published in Warsaw, Poland in 1961 and was later translated from Polish into French and finally into English in 1970. This unique science fiction novel was written by Stanislaw Lem.

The protagonist Kris Kelvin is a psychologist...

Thanks to Bryan Cranston’s Oscar-nominated performance as Dalton Trumbo, the irreverent and iconoclastic figure of American letters is perhaps known best as the guy who used to type while sitting in a bathtub full of water. At least his name is...

Edward O. Wilson is a well known biologist. Frustrated with the increasing political tension within the scientific community and against the scientific community, he wrote Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge in an effort to console all parties...

The Cat People started with a party. Noted horror and film noir director Jacques Tourneur was approached by a person who identity has disappeared into the archives of history. Just as Benjamin Braddock received career advice that was short and...

Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 American crime thriller that shows the activities of the eight main characters and several minor characters before, during, and after a botched diamond heist. This film is the full-length debut feature of director Quentin...

An important yet underrated memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994) is an exquisite work by Tobias Wolff. The book interpolates autobiographical elements and is essentially about the experiences of the author as an active...

The Woman in Black is a 1983 horror novella written in the style of a traditional Gothic novel by Susan Hill. The story begins with Arthur Kipps surrounded by his stepchildren at Christmas, each telling ghost stories. When Kipps is asked to talk...

Philaster; or, Love Lies-a-Bleeding is a story of romantic intrigue set in the court of the King of Sicily revolving around conventional courtly entanglements like a princess being promised by her father to one man while she is actually in love...

My World of the Unknown is a short story that is part of Alifa Rifaat’s larger collection of short stories, Distant View of a Minaret. The collection Distant View of a Minaret was published in 1983. Nearly all of her works in this collection...

The Play of Adam (Le Jeu d’Adam in the original French and also known in English as The Service for Representing Adam) dates back to the year 1180, thus giving it a notable place in history as one of the earliest (if not the earliest) drama...

Kipling is considered a British author; however, he was born in Bombay, India in 1865. He was educated in England and then returned to India as a young man to live and work. An extremely prolific writer, Kipling produced stories and poetry about...

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a short story collection by Yiyun Li. This work is Li’s first, and it was well received in the literary community. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award as...

Published in 1942, Go Down Moses evolved from connecting a series of previous published short stories by William Faulkner. The result was a novel that that enhances the history of McCaslin family specifically by splitting their family tree into...