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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...

In 1942, Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus”, an essay about absurdism, which revolutionized the absurdist movement and inspired the theater of the absurd. Some of the early plays included “The Maids” by Jean Genet, “The Bald Soprano” by...

My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, is an example of a genre of literature known as the slave narrative. This genre flourished from around 1760 and though the first few decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous...

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is collection of fairy tales written by Hermann Karl Hesse, a German poet and novelist as well as a Nobel-Prize winning laureate, and was published in 1995 by Bantam Books. The stories have mainly been...

Karl Marx gets all the press, but it is important to realize that much of the writing which established the communist ideology was either co-written by Friedrich Engels or based on concepts and research established and conducted by Engels. Then...

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a book written in 1883 by Howard Pyle. The story revolves around an archer who is extremely skilled and goes by the name of Robin Hood. He and his companions, called the Merry Men, live in Sherwood forest and...

The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from...

Published in London in 1767, The Man of Feeling made its author famous and became his most well-known work. The author of this story was a true man of his time and fell under the influence of sentimentalism. However, the idea of sentimentalism had...

Ivanhoe is most immediately notable within the expansive canon of Sir Walter Scott by virtue of its being his very first attempt at writing a tale exclusively devoted to a British subject. In fact, one is hard-pressed to get much more intensely...