Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
Karl Ritter von Frisch, was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Leslie Marmon Silko is an American writer. A woman of Laguna Pueblo descent, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
Count Jan Potocki was a Polish nobleman, ethnologist, linguist, traveller and author of the Enlightenment period, whose life and exploits made him a celebrated figure in Poland. He is known chiefly for his picaresque novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
Scandal Sheet is a 1952 American film noir directed by Phil Karlson. The film is based on the 1944 novel The Dark Page by Samuel Fuller, who himself was a newspaper reporter before his career in film. The drama features Broderick Crawford, Donna Reed and John Derek.
Voyager is a 1991 English-language drama film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy, and Barbara Sukowa. Adapted by screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer from the 1957 novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, the film is about a successful engineer traveling throughout Europe and the Americas whose world view based on logic, probability, and technology is challenged when he falls victim to fate, or a series of incredible coincidences.
Racial passing occurred when a person who was categorized as black, Negro, or Coloured as their Race in the United States of America, sought to be accepted or perceived ("passes") as a member of another racial group usually White. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a black person especially a Mulatto person who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination. In the Antebellum South, passing as white was a temporary disguise used as a means of escaping slavery.
Passing (1929) is a novel by American author Nella Larsen. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", which is a key element of the novel. Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is significant and is a catalyst for the tragic events.
American Born Chinese is a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. Released in 2006 by First Second Books, it was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards in the category of Young People's Literature. It won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, the Publishers Weekly Comics Week Best Comic of the Year, the San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, the 2006/2007 Best Book Award from The Chinese American Librarians Association, and Amazon.com Best Graphic Novel/Comic of the Year. It also made the Booklist Top Ten Graphic Novel for Youth, the NPR Holiday Pick, and Time Top Ten Comic of the Year. It was colored by cartoonist Lark Pien, who received the 2007 Harvey Award for Best Colorist for her work on the book.
Trey Ellis is an American novelist, screenwriter, professor, playwright, and essayist. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Hopkins School and Phillips Academy, Andover, where he studied under Alexander Theroux before attending Stanford University, where he was the editor of the Stanford Chaparral and wrote his first novel, Platitudes in a creative writing class taught by Gilbert Sorrentino. He is a professor of Professional Practice in the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Homo Faber: A Report is a novel by Swiss author Max Frisch, first published in Germany in 1957. An English translation by Michael Bullock was published in Britain in 1959. The novel is written as a first-person narrative. The protagonist, Walter Faber, is a successful engineer traveling throughout Europe and the Americas on behalf of UNESCO. His world view based on logic, probability, and technology is challenged by a series of incredible coincidences as his repressed past and chance occurrences come together to break up his severely rational, technically oriented ideology.
Trumpet is the debut novel from Scottish writer and poet Jackie Kay, published in 1998. It chronicles the life and death of fictional jazz artist Joss Moody through the recollections of his family, friends and those who came in contact with him at his death. Kay stated in an interview that her novel was inspired by the life of Billy Tipton, an American jazz musician who lived secretly as a transgender man in the mid-twentieth century.
Ventseslav Konstantinov was a Bulgarian writer, aphorist and translator of German and English literature.
Mein Name sei Gantenbein is a 1964 novel by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. It was translated into English in 1965 by Michael Bullock as A Wilderness of Mirrors; this translation was later reprinted under the title Gantenbein in 1982. The novel features a narrator who recounts a multitude of dislocated, fragmented stories, which together reveal certain traits and patterns.
Waiting for Sunrise is a 2012 espionage novel by William Boyd. The book was published on April 17, 2012, by Bloomsbury Press in the United Kingdom and by HarperCollins in the United States.
Any God Will Do is the sixth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon, first published by Random House in 1966. After the almost unmitigated grimness of his previous book, An Infinity of Mirrors, it was a return to his more usual light-heartedness as displayed in works such A Talent for Loving. Although its theme is madness, unusually for Condon it has little of the almost gratuitous scenes of violence and sudden deaths that punctuate most of his books. The only notable instance is that of a haughty French sommelier who shoots himself at an aristocratic dinner party when he discovers that an American guest is indeed correct in asserting a great white Burgundy can accompany young spring lamb.
Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt is the first novel of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911-1991). It was started during the winter of 1933 and published in Germany by Deutschen Verlags-Anstalt in 1934. Frisch would later distance himself from this juvenile autobiographical work which was not reprinted as an individual novel, although much later it was included in a compilation of Frisch's collected works. His second novel, J’adore ce qui me brûle, referred back to this first novel, being again centred on the same eponymous protagonist.
Drama is a graphic novel written by American cartoonist Raina Telgemeier which centers on the story of Callie, a middle school student and theater-lover who works in her school's drama production crew. While navigating seventh grade, Callie deals with tween hardship, including confusing crushes, budding friendships, and middle school drama. It is a coming-of-age story that explores themes of friendship, teamwork, inclusion, and determination through Callie and her relationship with the people around her.
