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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...

Annie John is a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985. The book revolves around Annie John, a young girl growing up in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. Annie loves her mother and follows her around everywhere, which is why she is distressed...

All but My Life is an inspirational and powerful story of Gerda Weissman Klein's life during World War II and the Holocaust. In her hometown of Bielitz, Poland, the Nazis invaded, and the situation quickly became increasingly hostile and...

Frequently considered as the first novel of the Young Adult genre, Across Five Aprils is a historical novel by written Irene Hunt and set in the civil war. It was published in 1964 by Berkley and won the 1965 Newbery Honor. Across Five Aprils...

Desperate Characters is a novel written by Paula Fox in 1970 and published by W.W. Norton & Company. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Sophie and Otto Brentwood. They are a middle-class and middle-aged couple who are wealthy and of...

Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. The novel is told in as a collection of short stories revolving around a circle of friends, who some of them are heroin users. The seven sections of the...

The Famished Road is a fantasy Booker-Prize winning novel written by Ben Okri and was published in the United Kingdom on 14 March 1991 by Jonathan Cape publishers.

The novel follows the life of Azaro, a spirit child, travelling in Nigeria. Azaro...

Jeanette Winterson is an English author born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England. She grew up in a very religious household, but her sexual identity as a lesbian often conflicted with the values of her Church. At age 16, she decided to leave...

I, Robot is not exactly a novel in the traditional sense. And yet, it is something more than a mere collection of loosely connected short stories as well. In addition to the recurrence of certain characters, the unifying aspect that maintains the...