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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...

All the Names, originally titled Todos os Nomes, is a novel written by the author Jose Saramago. It was published in 1997 by Caminho Publishing in Portugal, originally in the Portuguese language.

The book is centered around Senhor Jose, a man...

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...

Geoffrey Trease is a well-known twentieth century poet and children's novelist. He has a prolific career which is dominated by his historical fiction. Revered for his candid approach to history for children, he presents historical settings in his...

Published in 1944 when Somerset Maugham was 70 years old, The Razor’s Edge would come to be considered the last of his major works of fiction. The philosophical awareness that any man naturally arrives at by the advanced age at which Maugham...

Published in 1857, Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope’s sequel to The Warden and almost certainly the most well-known of the author’s Barsetshire series. Ostensibly a portrait of life the clerics in a “cathedral town” the renowned social...

Eleanor H. Ayer is an American novelist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her book Parallel Journeys. She was born and raised in Vermont, and was inspired to write at an early age by her mother's career as a teacher. After graduating...

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published the very same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both novels present a portrait of what it meant to be an American in the early part of the 20th century, but in reading one can be...

Under the Jaguar Sun is a novel written by Italo Calvino and published in 1986. Calvino is an Italian author and journalist. This novel was first written and published in Italian, but it was soon translated into English in 1988. In fact, Calvino...

Published in 1894, The Story of a Modern Woman was written by Ella Dixon. The novel was actually first printed in a series in The Lady’s Pictorial. The book was written in the late Victorian age in England, and is one of the works in the New Woman...

Tracks is a novel that was written by Louise Erdrich and was published in 1988. It is the third book in a series of four books that tell the story of four Anishinaabe families that are all somehow connected to each other. All of them live on an...