Although not exceptionally well-known, Masahiro Shinoda's film Double Suicide (1969) is one of the most unique films ever to have been produced. Based on a Japanese play called The Love Suicides at Amijima, Double Suicides tells the story of the...

Pan's Labyrinth is a Mexican-Spanish fantasy film from 2006, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. It stars Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones, and Ariadna Gil. It incorporates animatronics and CGI as a way of building its...

Fiela’s Child is a 1985 novel by the South African writer Dalene Matthee. It tells the story of Fiela Komoetie, a black woman in 19th-century South Africa who finds a white toddler at her doorstep. She takes him in, names him Benjamin, and raises...

In 1645, John Milton published “Il Penseroso” in a collection of poetry alongside another poem entitled “L’Allegro.” The poems take opposite sides in a debate about whether it is better to live a carefree life or a contemplative life. The speaker...

Bodega Dreams tells the story of a young man named Chino who lives in Spanish Harlem. One day he crosses paths with Willie Bodega, who is part man, part legend. He is also a gangster, a community activist and a man with dreams that know no limits....

The Shoe Horn Sonata is a play by Australian playwright John Misto, one of Australia's most eminent playwrights who has also worked as a script writer for Australian television, creating and writing the hit television series The Damnation of...

Written by Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, Sharp Objects (Flynn's debut novel which was published in 2006) tells the story of a woman named Camille Preaker. After a while away and after a short spell at a psychiatric hospital, Preaker returns to...

Marieke Nijkamp's book This Is Where It Ends (published in 2016) is certainly an interesting and unique book. The book takes place over the course of only 54 minutes and goes minute-by-minute through one students quest for revenge as they begin to...

Boys & Sex written by Peggy Orenstein is about exactly what the title hints: Boys and Sex. After writing her book; Girls & Sex she found the trail of writing from the other point of view. The book opens up a dialogue about boys, their...

Written by Nobel Prize in Economics Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) which summarizes Kahneman's work over several decades first in cognitive bias, prospect theory, and finally, his work on happiness and what it means to be happy....

Alice Pung's memoir Unpolished Gem (originally published in 2006) is certainly an interesting book. It tells the story of Pung and her family as they fled from Cambodia (which was enveloped in Civil War and genocide) and went to Australia. The...

Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10 (published in 2016) tells the story of a journalist named Lo Blacklock who is given an assignment many journalists can only dream of -- a week on a luxury cruise that has only a few people on it. When she first...

Regarded as one of the best memoirs ever about World War II, E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed (published in 1981, over 35 years after he fought in the Pacific). Sledge began to write the memoir in 1944 based off the notes he took during battle. It...

Written by English author and poet Thomas Hardy, "A Wife in London" is Hardy's bleak and dreary anti-war poem crafted two months after the start of the bloody Second Boer War (1899 through 1902). Hardy, a Brit, was alarmed with his country's...

Irish author Edna O'Brien originally intended her first novel, The Country Girls to be a trilogy; the novel, first published as one book with three distinct parts, was first published as a single volume in 1986, but had been published more than...