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Gabriela Mistral who was born in 1889 and died in 1957, was perhaps the most famous female Latin American author, if not woman, of her time. What distinguished her as a writer was her bending of practices, drawing from European and native...

A Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright, Reinaldo Arenas was known for his defiance and rebellion against the Cuban government, despite the fact that he was initially quite sympathetic of their cause.His works have been seminal in the Latin...

Porcelain is a play written and directed by Singapore playwright Chay Yew. The play was released in 1993 in the United Kingdom, and was later moved to the London Royal Theater. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yew said about the play,...

First published 1999, Wonderland is a play by Chay Yew, a gay, Singapore-born American writer of Chinese descent. Along with Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, Wonderland is part of Yew's "Whitelands Trilogy." It was also published in a...

Federico Garcia Lorca was born to a wealthy family in Spain in 1898. He grew up near Grenada where he received an excellent education and excelled as a piano player. After initially hoping to become a musician, Lorca began writing in 1916. Still,...

No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff was published in 1996. The main character is Clare Savage, where the novel follows her life. Clare must find her own identity, and this book shows a coming-of-age theme, where Clare grows up to be herself....

Doctor No is the sixth novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and was first published in 1958. The story centers on Bond's investigation into the disappearance of fellow MI6 operative Commander John Strangeways whilst in Jamaica. He establishes...

Peter Greenaway is an English filmmaker born on April 5, 1942 in Newport, Wales. As a child, he had his sights set on becoming a painter, but he also maintained a love for cinema and storytelling. He cites his main cinematic influences as Ingmar...

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1913, Robert Hayden may seem to have made only a minor impact on the world when he died in nearby Ann Arbor in 1980. What that low figure on Hayden’s odometer does not reflect is the lives he touched over the course of...

Saturday is a novel written by Ian McEwan and published in 2005. The narrative is set in London in 2003, during a time in February where there were protests happening because of the United States’ invasion of Iraq during that time. The setting of...

Cold Sassy Tree is a historical novel set in the fictional town of Cold Sassy of Georgia in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was written by Olive Ann Burns, and was her first work. When Burns wrote the novel, she...

Meera Syal is an Indian-British actor and writer born on June 27, 1961 in Wolverhampton, England. As a child, she noticed she was the only Asian person in her school, and this division she felt between the rest of her peers was heavily influential...

The novel A Pale View of the Hills was written in 1982. This is the debut novel of Kazuo Ishiguro - a British writer with Japanese roots. It is difficult to answer unequivocally whether this is a British novel with Japanese coloring or vice versa....

America Is in the Heart, sometimes (albeit infrequently) called America Is in the Heart: A Personal History is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the Filipino-American author, immigrant, and activist Carlos Bulosan, originally published in...

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud was written by Herbert Marcuse and first published in 1955 by Beacon Press. In it, Marcuse, a German philosopher, explores and analyses the social theories espoused by Sigmund Freud and, to...

Awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney was one of most prolific poets and playwrights of recent times. Born in County Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1939, in his lifetime he published numerous poetry collections to great...

My Life is a book of poetry written by Lyn Hejinian and released in 2002. The book arrived forty years into Hejinian's long and prolific career. Hejinian was born in California in 1941, where still remains today. She is married to famous jazz...

Commencing in 1870 and continuing through 1893, French novelist Emile Zola produced twenty novels which have come to be termed the Rougon-Macquarts series. These novels, which essentially consumed the writing passion of Zola over the course of...

To the Lighthouse (1927) is widely considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century. With this ambitious novel, Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. The novel develops innovative literary...

The Ghost Road is the third and final novel in the series of anti-war novels known collectively as "The Regeneration Trilogy". Written by acclaimed British author Pat Barker,it is both a historical novel and a book that shows how life can be both...

The Eye in the Door is the second in a series of three anti-war novels written by acclaimed British author Pat Barker. Known collectively as "The Regeneration Trilogy", each of the novels takes place during World War One and features the same...

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) is the product of the collaborative effort of Malcolm X and journalist Alex Haley. To create the autobiography, Malcolm X endured several years of interviews with Haley. As Malcolm X shared the intricacies of...

Mao II is the tenth novel written by postmodernist author Don DeLillo. Published in 1991, Mao II gets its name based on Andy Warhol's famous prints depicting Mao Zedong. The book won the 1992 Faulkner Award. It was also the discussion and lecture...

After her early upbringing as a child of Irish and French Creole descent in the upper class of St. Louis in the decades surrounding the Civil War, Kate Chopin married Oscar Chopin, a Creole businessman, and moved with him to New Orleans. In New...