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The Woman in the Dunes is a novel crafted by Japanese writer and playwright Koko Abe and published in 1962. It is the story of a teacher interested in insects who went in search of a rare instance of the Spanish fly. Stumbling on a remote village,...

Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when...

John McCrae was a Canadian poet, artist and author. He was also a soldier in World War I, which greatly influenced his poetry. His poems are drawn from his first hand experiences on the front line and his times treating the wounded soldiers.

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The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...

A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).

This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...

Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...

A Long Way from Chicago was written by Richard Peck, a writer, playwright, and speaker, in 1998 and won a Newbury Honor in 1999. Its sequel, A Year Down Yonder, was published in 2000 and won the Newbery Medal in 2001.

The book tells the story of...

Written in 1897 and published in 1903, Such Is Life is a novel written by Joseph Furphy. The book is the fictional diary of the protagonist and narrator Tom Collins. Taking place in Australia, the diary recounts the lives of the people who live in...

For the Term of His Natural Life is a book written by English-born Australian author Marcus Clarke. It was written in the middle 1870s and is part novel, part history book and gives a vivid and realistic account of the brutality of the colonial...

First published in 1966 by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian author, A Jest of God tells of a 34-year-old schoolteacher named Rachel Cameron who lives with her mother.

Rachel feels trapped in the deceit and pettiness of her small town that includes...

Anyone who has seen the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon has already also read it…to a point. The most famous and beloved film version of the story of Sam Spade on the trail of the black bird is actually one of...

Dennis Scott was born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in 1939. He was educated at Jamaica College, and later at the University of the West Indies, where he received a B.A. in English. a He published his first collection of poetry in 1973. The...

Mother Night is based on personal experience, for it is a well-known fact that Vonnegut saw the horrors of the war with his own eyes. This work was published in 1961, for it took him some time to reflect on his role in the war. He also knew about...

Hunters in the Snow and Other Stories, also published as The Stories of Tobias Wolff, is a collection of short stories by Professor Tobias Wolff at the University of Stanford. The collection was first published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

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They Cage the Animals at Night is an autobiography, written by Jennings Michael Burch. Burch was left at an orphanage when he was eight, and his mother, who was too sick to adequately take care of him, did not come back. At his young age, Burch...

Water For Elephants is an historical novel by Sara Gruen. It was written as part of National Novel Writing Month. Gruen has said that the backbone of her story parallels the biblical story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis.

The unusual title comes...

All Souls: A Family Story From Southie is an autobiographical memoir written by Michael Patrick MacDonald and published by Beacon Press in September 1999. The writing recounts MacDonald's growing up in the Old Colony Housing Projects in South...

John Charles Chasteen, born in 1955, is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Rejecting much of the neocolonialist depictions of Latin America commonly found in history texts, he saw a need for a textbook that presented Latin...

The Emigrants was written by Winfried Georg Sebald, which was first published during 1992 and was later published during 2002 by Vintage. This story plainly documents the lives of four German/Jewish emigrants during the twentieth century. Sebald's...

Pragmatism and Other Writings is a collection of William James’ writings and lectures that was compiled and published in 2000. Though his philosophical writings were concentrated in the late 1800s, this collection compiles some of the most...

Specials is the last part of the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. The novel's target audience is young adults and it is filled with action and adventure of the young teenage girl called Tally. This novel represents Tally's final transformation...

Pretties is a novel written by Scott David Westerfeld and published in 2005. It is the second installment of the Uglies trilogy. Pretties is a young adult, science fiction novel that tells of a dystopian world that forces every 16 year old to have...

Bernard Malamud was an American author born on April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. He came from a humble background considering his parents were both Russian immigrants and he worked everyday as a teacher’s assistant to support his family. After...