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Strength in What Remains was written by Tracy Kidder, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was published in 2009. The book is a nonfiction book, a biography of a man from Burundi named Deogratias, aka Deo. Deo is a Tutsi who survived the Hutu-Tutsi...

Tobias Wolff is an American author born on June 19, 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. After graduating high school, he attended Hertford College to study English and later enrolled at Stanford University to obtain his M.A. Afterward, Wolff ventured...

Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) wrote Till We Have Faces in 1956. This was his last novel and was cowritten by his wife, Joy Davidman. It is the retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. Lewis developed the idea for this novel...

Robert Zimmerman - whose nom de plume is Robert Alexander - is an American author whose works so far have concentrated on fictionalizing significant moments in the history of Russia. Born and raised in Chicago, Zimmerman has travelled to and...

Published in 2005 by a prominent American historian, David McCoullogh’s 1776 discusses the events of the American Revolution and is considered a companion of his Pulitzer-winning biography of John Adams, which was adapted by HBO into a miniseries....

“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” is an example of a form of storytelling alternatively known as a “paired story” or a “diptych” in which two separate and distinct works are connected thematically in some manner. As a literary...

The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 and became an instant classic, not just within the science fiction genre but in the wider, mainstream literary world. It was not written as a novel, but was a conglomeration of several short stories...

Charles Baudelaire is considered one of the most stimulating poets of the nineteenth century. He was born during 1821 in France and died during 1867. Although he was a poet, he was also a novelist and prose writer. According to the Poetry...

A Bildungsroman (coming of age) story about a black boy growing up in America, The White Boy Shuffle is the debut novel of American author and poet Paul Beatty. Published in 1996, the book is acclaimed for its insight into African-American culture...

Jasper Fforde was born in London, England and spent almost twenty years working in the film industry. He worked on movies which included Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. His desire to become a novelist and create his own works, drove...

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise are a series of letters written in Latin in the twelfth century and published in Paris in 1616. From then, the letters sped all over Europe and were translated anonymously into various languages. The letters tell...

Cousin Bette is a narrative of a famous French realist-writer Honore de Balzac written in 1846. The main theme of the book is the display of disastrous consequences of dependent and humiliating position of a poor relative for a person’s character....

The National Book Award for Fiction winner in 1990 was Middle Passage by Charles Johnson. The title is a reference to the long and often terrifying transport of African slaves across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. The...

Push by Sapphire tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones, a 16-year-old overweight, impoverished girl living in the slums of Harlem. At the start of the novel, Claireece is pregnant with her second child, a result of the sexual abuse she...

José Saramago’s 1997 novel, All the Names, translated through Margaret Jull Costa, is a profound exploration of identity, bureaucracy, loneliness, and the imperative human want for connection. Set in an unnamed city, the narrative facilities on...

Published in 1976--the year America was celebrating all the nice history making up its bicentennial--Flight to Canada is a parody or satire or pastiche of the slave narrative by Ishmael Reed that draws attention to the inherent flaws in a genre...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published her first volume of poetry when she was just 16, carved out fame on the anti-slavery lecture circuit by publically speaking on the subject in excess of two hours without consulting a written text or notes and...

Published in 1900, The House Behind the Cedars was the first published novel by Charles Chesnutt. One of the testaments to the status that the African-African writer had achieved after a career of highly regarded short stories published in the...

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is a 1846 work of travel literature by Herman Melville. Typee was both Melville’s first book and his most popular during his lifetime.

Typee is a blend of fiction and nonfiction which has frustrated critics for...

Rifles for Watie is a 1957 children’s novel about the American Civil War. Unlike most historical fiction works regarding the same topic, Rifles for Watie takes place west of the Mississippi River. The book also includes characters based on real...

At Fault is Kate Chopin’s first novel which was written between July 1889 and April 1890. Upon completion, she submitted it to Bedford’s Monthly; a literary journal that made room for one novel in each issue. Upon rejection, Chopin decided to...

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Background David Hume published An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748. He was a respected empiricist philosopher, meaning he believed that all thought is based upon experience. Credited with...

The Birds premiered at the theater of Dionysus at Athens as part of the festival taking place in that city in what would have been March of 414 B.C. As proof that some things never change, today this comedy is generally agreed to be one of the...

Tristram Shandy is, almost beyond argument, the most unusual, outrageously experimental and subversive novel that most people who possess basic literacy skills could ever read. While James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake definitely outstrips this novel in...