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Frank Bidart’s collection of poems from 1965 to 2016, published in 2017 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The collection was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2017. Bidart also won...

If there is a required job history for a poet, it is quite likely that Texan-born Jonah Winter can meet it, having worked as a llama rancher (among other stints) before embarking on his career as a writer of poetry. Winter was initially drawn to...

John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill, a legal thriller, in 1989 while he was a practicing lawyer in Mississippi. While observing a trial in the courthouse near his practice, he witnessed the testimony of a 12-year-old who was raped and beaten, and...

The Rez Sisters is a play by Canadian playwright Tomson Highway. First performed in 1986, the play is centered on seven Native women who live on a fictional reserve called Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. It is the...

Down Second Avenue is a semi-autobiographical memoir by novelist, teacher, and writer Ezekiel Es’kia Mphahlele. It was released in South Africa by Peter Smith Publishers in 1959. Es’kia was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1969 and is highly...

The Ecstasy of Influence is Jonathan Lethem's fifth book since his first breakthrough The Fortress of Solitude in the year 2003 which ranked as a bestseller. The book was later followed by several works such as Men and Cartoon an imaginary...

Tom McCarthy's Spotlight (released in 2015) tells the story of eponymous "Spotlight" team from the Boston Globe, who were tasked with investigating the plague of child abuse cases in the Boston area - and more broadly, across the world -...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, written by J.K. Rowling. In this book, Harry struggles under the heavy responsibility to face the evil Lord Voldemort and save the people he loves most. It is...

Etheridge Knight is an African-American poet born in Mississippi. His serious involvement with poetry came after his imprisonment which was a result of a drug addiction which was a relief from pain because of an injury he received while serving in...

Fire on the Mountain is a 1977 novel by Anita Desai that deals with the subjects of solitude, existentialism, and oppression of females in patriarchal Indian society. The book tells the story of Nanda Kaul, a widowed, reclusive woman who has to...

The Water Dancer is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel. It debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2019. Coates has said that he worked on the novel for a decade in “various...

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a collection of theoretical texts, memoir, and poetry, first published in 1987. Since then, it has become not just Anzaldúa’s most famous work, but a foundational text in Chicana/o, gay...

The first in a five-book series by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley presents sociopathic murderer Tom Ripley and the first of his criminal exploits centering around Italy and the carefree, rich scion Dickie Greenleaf. The novel became...

It is safe to say that Looking for Alibrandi isn't one of the most well-known films in the world (since on a budget of only $4.5 million, the film made back $8.3 million). However, it is certainly a very good film. In his review for...

Liliana Heker's "The Stolen Party" is a short story about nine-year-old Rosaura attending a birthday party at the house where her mother Herminia works as a maid. While Herminia warns Rosaura against believing she will be accepted as an equal by...

The Shape of Our Faces No Longer Matters is a collection of poems written by war veteran Tony Mena and is part of the Military-Service Literature Series. While on tour in Iraq, Mena was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal for numerous acts of...

Based on historical events, Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is a chilling tale of unsolved murder. Pollock stages the events surrounding the deaths of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden, believed to have been perpetrated by Lizzie Borden, their...

Set in the slums of Melbourne in 1919, Robert Newton's Runner follows fifteen-year-old Charlie Feehan as he drops out of school to take a job running packages and collecting money for a notorious gangster named Squizzy Taylor.

Though the job helps...

In the summer of 1741, Jonathan Edwards, a towering intellectual figure of the Great Awakening, author of books on a multitude of subjects, and one of the key ministers at the forefront of the call for a return to orthodoxy in the Puritan church,...

Lion is a 2016 film based on Saroo Brierley's autobiographical novel, A Long Way Home. The film tells the story of a 30-year-old man who was adopted at the age of five in India and now lives in Australia, who travels back to India in an attempt to...

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the debut full-length poetry collection by Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong. Vuong initially wrote the poems in the collection and assembled them for an open contest that claimed each rejection would be...

Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays written and published by the African-American author James Baldwin. The collection was published in 1955 and is made up of essays previously published in literary and political magazines. The essays...

Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire is the fourth novel in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series. Harry Potter is a book series about a young wizard who is trying to defeat Lord Voldemort. Lord Voldemort is a powerful Dark wizard who has killed many...

Junot Díaz first published Drown with Riverhead Books in the United States in 1996. It quickly became a national bestseller and garnered almost immediate critical acclaim. Drown is a collection of short stories that are loosely tied together...