The Hole - José Revueltas (trans. Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson) (1969)
The Hole is a short, intense vignette of an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison....
War: How Conflict Shaped Us - Margaret MacMillan (2020)
This book is a survey of the effects of war on human society....
Yi Yi - dir. Edward Yang (2000)
Yi Yi is an elegantly constructed portrait of a family in Taipei in the 1990s. It is bookended by a wedding, at which the family matriarch takes ill, and a funeral, at which the family commemorates her death. In between, we witness the characters and the emotional mysteries that they confront—NJ, the quiet, frustrated father; Yang Yang, his inquisitive son; Ting Ting, his teenage daughter, pulled between her neighbor and her neighbor’s boyfriend....
The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections - V.S. Naipual (1987)
Over the course of five sections, The Enigma of Arrival draws an autobiographical portrait of an unnamed narrator that strongly resembles the author. Like Naipaul, the narrator is ethnically Hindu, raised in Trinidad, and schooled in England....
The Little Things - dir. John Lee Hancock (2021)
The Little Things is a procedural crime thriller in the vein of Seven, Zodiac, and Prisoners. It shares with those works a tension built from its characters' monomania, as Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) and Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) seek a serial killer in early 1990s Los Angeles....