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On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Lifeis an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche published as part of his Untimely Meditation in 1874. The essay is a definitively modernist argument against a politically motivated retelling of the events of...

The Gay Science was originally published in 1882 with a second edition published five years later expanded to include an additional “fifth book” as well as an appendix of songs. Although the title is perhaps not quite as familiar to those...

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. It was published in 1993 and received the Booker Proze later that year.

Tge story is about a ten-year-old boy living in Barrytown, North Dublin, in 1968, and tells of the events that...

Acquainted With the Night is a non-fiction novel written by Christopher Dewdney in 2004. The book revolves around the 'night' and its various aspects of it. The book has 14 chapters and each chapter refers to a certain hour of the night and...

In 1994, Lois Lowry was awarded one of the highest annual honors given out for juvenile literature when her novel The Giver won the Newberry Award. That book remains her signature work, but in the decades since she has revisited the dystopia she...

Gathering Blue is a book written by Lois Lowry and published in 2000. The book is mainly centered around the character called Kira who has a disability by way of a deformed leg. She is an orphan as both her parents are dead so she now has to adapt...

L'œuvre is a French novel by Emile Zola, loosely translated as His Masterpiece or The Masterpiece. The Masterpiece was published as a serial in 1885 and as a novel by Charpentier in 1886. The title is a reference to the problems the protagonist...

Born in 1908, by the time Theodore Roethke died in 1963 he had established himself as one of the most important poets of his generation and with “My Papa’s Waltz” also became one of the most widely read. To find a college student who has not been...

Desert Solitaire is an autobiographical nature journal by Edward Abbey, published in 1968. It is Abbey's fourth published book and first full length non-fiction work.

Frequently compared to Thoreau's Walden, Desert Solitaire is regarded highly as...

The Deerslayer is the last entry in what has become known as the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This final look back at the story at the title character actually named Natty Bumppo (but more often referred to as Hawkeye) and his...

Jonathan Coe is a contemporary British novelist, known for his fictional works which balance satire and politics in equal measure. He was born to a working class family in a suburb of Birmingham in 1961. He studied at Cambridge University, and...

The Day of the Triffids became the first novel that author John Wyndham published under his own name and started readers immediately upon its appearance in 1951 with its memorable opening sequence. A man wakes up in a hospital amidst a strange...

Like many people, Betty Friedan decided to attend a college reunion fifteen years after graduating. The institution of higher learning was a prestigious women’s college, Smith. Unlike most people who attend a college reunion, Friedan came equipped...

Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong, an eminent novelist and poet who also frequently engaged in satire. She held many controversial views towards sexuality and feminism which became entrenched in her most famous novel, Fear of Flying. ...

Published in December 1916, Under Fire (French title: Le Feu) is a war novel based on Henri Barbusse's own experiences fighting on the Western Front of World War I. It was one of the first novels about World War I, and was written while Barbusse...

Main Street is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920.

The satirical novel criticizes the small-town lifestyle, classing it amongst Lewis' contemporaries as somewhat bleak in nature.The reception amongst real-life small-town residents was...

Pushing The Bear is an historical novel by Diane Glancy. It explores the lives of the Cherokee in the years spanning 1838-1839duribg their forced removal from their land along the Trail of Tears.

Glancy adheres strictly to historical accuracy and...

American Knees is a fictional novel written by Shawn Wong published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster. In 2005, it was re-issued by the University of Washington Press.

The novel was first published when Wong was 45. When asked about the title in an...

Published in 1992 by Southern Methodist University Press, this novel is an historical account from a subjective humanized perspective rather than an objective event analysis. The novel delves in the American history through 1931 mining camp of...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an 18th century philosopher. His doctrines predominantly pertain to politics and the function of government, his most important work being The Social Contract. He was interested in adapting society to be most...

Particularities of the author:

Until 1995, Bolaño was a practically unknown author. Finding himself in a precarious economic situation, he sent the manuscript of “Nazi literature in America” to various publishers, finally being accepted by Seix...

Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 in French which was translated first into English by Just O'Brien in 1955. The book is a philosophical essay in four parts, "An Absurd Reasoning," "The Absurd Man," "Absurd Creation," and "The...

"The Kreutzer Sonata" is Leo Tolstoy's novel, published in 1890 and immediately censored by the tsarist authorities. The book proclaims the ideal of abstinence and describes in the first person anger of jealousy. The name of the story gave number...

Premiering in 1905 and published in 1907, Major Barbara is a three-part play written by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, and critic. The plot revolves around a young woman named Barbara who is in the Salvation Army, and her efforts to...