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Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, is an erotic novel written by John Cleland and was first published in 1748. The novel is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form...

Though The Beggar's Opera has earned a reputation for its ironically rambunctious exploration of amoral characters, crime syndicates, and overt sexuality, John Gay originally intended it primarily as a political statement, a comment on both the...

Citizen Kane has widely been praised as the greatest film ever made, particularly for its innovative narrative structure, its cinematography, editing, and Orson Welles' tour de force performance. Pauline Kael called it "the one American talking...

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie's first novel, was published in 2000.

Although Dai is a Chinese national, he wrote the novel in French, his second language. The story follows two 'city youths' who are sent to a mountain village...

John Marsden is a teacher and novelist born on September 27, 1950 in Victoria, Australia. As a teenager, he was often times alienated and bullied by his classmates, which took its toll by the time he reached college. After graduating from high...

Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All is a one-act play by Christopher Durang that has proven to be one of the most durable and reliable crowd-pleasers of the latter 20th century. Since its very first production by the Ensemble Studio Theater in...

The House of Blue Leaves is play written by John Guare which premiered February 10, 1971, at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in New York and proceeded to enjoy and initial off-Broadway run of 337 performances. The play was the first in a series of...

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is one of the most significant works of fiction by an African American author and one of the preeminent works of the Harlem Renaissance (although it was published first in 1912 and...

Flight was written by Sherman Alexie and published in 2007 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Press. A magical realist novel, it tells the story of a troubled Native American teen who has reached his breaking point after years of abuse at the hands...

The Good Earth was published in 1931. It was an immediate hit and has remained Buck's most well-known text. The novel has been translated into more than thirty different languages. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1932. The Good Earth...

At one point in history, the name Preston Sturges was as well known among lovers of movie comedy as Billy Wilder. Criminally little-known and underappreciated today, Sturges was the master of the snappy, crackling, fast-paced dialogue of the...

Jacques Tourneur is one of the greatest film directors all of time whose name most people don’t know. He directed three classic horror/thriller films in a row for legendary producer Val Lewton: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard...

Although occasionally referenced among those movies described as “film noir” the reality is that the only people who consider Laura to belong to that particular genre are those who think that any movie filmed in black and white after the bombing...

Casablanca is one of the most recognized films in Hollywood history. The American Film Institute named it the third-best American film of all time, with Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane coming in first and second, respectively. In 1983, The...

Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes is the first book in Year of Impossible Goodbyes series. The other books in the series are Echoes of the White Giraffe (1993) and Gathering of Pearls (1994). Published in 1991, it is set in 1945 Korea...

Alicia: My Story is the autobiographical account of Alicia Appleman-Jurman, a Polish-born Israeli–American writer who wrote about her experiences in enduring the Holocaust. The autobiography was published in Toronto and New York by Bantam in 1988....

A Prayer for Owen Meany is a novel written by John Winslow Irving and published in 1989. Irving’s seventh novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany recounts the life of John Wheelwright, whose best friend is named Owen Meany.

This novel was well received and...

William Dean Howells is an American writer and critic who lived between 1837 and 1920. He is also known for his influence and contribution to the printing business, something he did since an early age. The first piece of writing written by Howell...

Cao Xueqin(Tsao Hsueh-Chin)'s Dream of the Red Chamber, also translated as The Story of the Stone, is widely considered the greatest and most studied of Chinese classical literature. Initially written in the mid 1700s, the work has since been...

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice was the sixth play written by Jim Cartwright. It. was staged at the Royal National Theatre in London and debuted in June of 1992. It was later staged on Broadway in 1994 and was adapted into a film in 1998, before...

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was co-written in 2008 by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows, after Shaffer became ill with cancer and couldn't finish writing the book herself. Guernsey was Shaffer's first novel and...

The Hero and the Crown is a 1984 fantasy novel by Robin McKinley and a prequel to her 1982 novel, The Blue Sword, in which the protagonist of the former novel was first featured as a legendary character. The Hero and the Crown won the1985 Newbery...

Small Island is a book written by Andrea Levy in 2004. The novel revolves around World War II and the status of immigrants in Britain after the War. The story tells of a British couple who had been separated when the husband went to fight in the...

Gates of Fire is a historical fiction novel written by Steven Pressfield in 1998. The book revolves mainly around the war between the Greek forces against the imposing Persian army. The Persian forces are being led by the King called Xerxes and he...