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Anyone coming to “A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father” before reading any of his other works would almost certainly come away with a distinctly different impression of the type of writer Henry Lawson was than those who concluded their survey...

"The No-Guitar Blues," written by Gary Soto, is a short story. It is about a boy named Fausto, who very much wants a guitar. He asks his parents, but they say that guitars are too expensive. He then tries to think of ways to get a guitar. After a...

Sharing its name with tale by Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom was noted short story writer Eudora Welty’s first novel, published in 1942. A mélange of myth and legend with generous allusions to tales both fairy-based and folk-based, Welty...

Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” was initially published in Atlantic magazine and then showed up in her 1941 collection of stories titled A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. The inspiration for the tale came during Welty’s days as a...

The Optimist’s Daughter was first presented to a once-idealistic society soured on the cynicism of assassinations, riots, and the comeback of Richard Nixon and took the form of a long short story published in the New Yorker in 1969. By 1972, an...

Eudora Welty is an American author born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. As a child, she was continuously inspired by her mother, a teacher, and her father, an insurance executive. Welty’s mother instilled in her a love for reading and a...

The System of the World is a science fiction novel that was written by Neal Stephenson. It is the last book in the trilogy The Baroque Cycle, with the first two being Quicksilver and The Confusion of the World. The System of the World is highly...

The Confusion is the second in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle series. Published in 2004, the novel received the Locus Award in 2005. It's one of Stephenson's most reputable books, a sign of his ability to adapt to a rapidly changing historical...

Quicksilver is a 2003 novel of the picaresque genre, written by Neal Stephenson and published by a subsidiary of HarperCollins. The book is the first of Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle trilogy, a series of historical novels.

Quicksilver contains...

Anathemis a fictional novel written by Neal Stepheson and published by William Morrow and Company in 2008.

Like Stepheson's other works, Anathemoffers speculation about philosphical theoriesand metaphysics.

While conceptualizing the novel,...

Neal Stephenson, the author of Reamde, is an American writer and game designer who is most known for his works of speculative fiction. He includes a lot of math, science, cryptography, philosophy, currency and economics, and linguistics in all of...

Neal Town Stephenson, born in 1959, is an American Science-Fiction writer and futurist. Coming from a family of scientists, Stephenson studied geography and physics before publishing his first novel in 1984. Besides writing novels under his own...

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. It was first published in 1995 and, in 1996, won both the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

According...

Published in 1992, Snow Crash was written by Neal Stephenson and is a science fiction novel that involves a lot of history, archaeology, religion, and cryptography.

Stephenson titled this book “Snow Crash” because the earliest Apple Macs had...

The Good Terrorist is a political novel written in 1985 by British author Doris Lessing. Since its publication, it has been highly controversial; Lessing was inspired to write it after the Irish Republican Army left a bomb at Harrods, London's...

Jessica Hagedorn, author of The Blossoming of Bongbong, is a well-regarded Filipino writer, playwright, poet, and multimedia performance artist. She gives life to a rather confused and superficial character named Bongbong in this book, which was...

Published in 1990, Dogeaters earned Jessica Hagedorn an American Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Award, losing out to Charles Johnson’s highly acclaimed Middle Passage. With chapter narrative by five different characters...

The collection of stories that make up The Conjure Woman is most often categorized (and rightly so) as a giant leap forward in African-American literature. Such a categorization makes sense if the stories are approached only from the perspective...

The Tales of the Argonauts is a novel written by Bret Harte that was published in 1875. The novel is not a retelling of the adventures of Jason and his Argonauts, but rather it tells the story of the people who moved to California in search of...

Published in 1868, Bret Harte’s short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” is generally considered to be one of the first examples of new American literary genre about to explode onto the national scene and help carve out the identity of the still...

"The Black Monk” belongs to that lush category of fiction which is said to have been inspired by the dreams of the author. The nature of remembering dreams being what it is, one should take any assertion on this subject with a grain of salt. This...

Technically, the title of this story by Anton Chekhov usually carries the indefinite article rather than the definite, thus making it a story about “A Malefactor” rather than “The Malefactor.” Since there are only two major characters at play,...

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Russia in 1860. He initially wanted to study Medicine but he later also began a career as an author. He died in 1904 in Germany after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Agafya focuses on the story of Savka, a...

"Marriage" is a play by Nikolai Gogol was written in 1833-1835 years, and published in 1842.

Gogol began work on the comedy, originally named "Grooms" in 1833. In May 1835 he gave Pogodin excerpts from the play "Provincial bride" (the action took...