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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...

Some novelists knock it out of the park on their first try and spend an entire career trying to live up to the great promise. Other writers must take time to mature and grow before it all comes together toward the end of their life. Very few...

The infinitely rebellious writer known as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) would have been one of those real life people who show up as disguised as fictional characters in works by others if she hadn’t been a a writer herself. In an age...

The novel Cold Mountain was published in the year 1997 by the American author Charles Frazier and is generally regarded as a historical romance, with the action being set during the American Civil War.

The main character of the novel is an...

Published in 1999, A Star Called Henry is a novel written by Roddy Doyle, an Irish author. A Star Called Henry is the second book in “The Last Roundup” series. The protagonist of the novel is named Henry Smart. Smart, as a child, lived in the...

Set against the stark background of World War II, City of Thieves is a historical fiction novel by David Benioff published in 2008. Centering around two young boys in Soviet Russia and their daring quest, the story qualifies for the Bildungsroman...

Theodor Fontane had enjoyed a long career as a travel writer, almost been executed as a spy and enjoyed a twenty-year long gig as a theater critic before he found the ideal medium for his literary expression. Fontane did not publish his first...

Although the origin of this novel was published under anonymous, it is assumed that the author was Madame de Lafayette, born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne. In the year 1650, she was the maid-of-honour to the Queen and began to learn how to...

A Moveable Feast, written by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1964. This volume was published by his wife, the fourth one, after his death; the book is a memoir about his life in Paris and other places, and Hemingway's relationships between...

Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recognizable work, In Search of...

Gabriela Mistral who was born in 1889 and died in 1957, was perhaps the most famous female Latin American author, if not woman, of her time. What distinguished her as a writer was her bending of practices, drawing from European and native...

A Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright, Reinaldo Arenas was known for his defiance and rebellion against the Cuban government, despite the fact that he was initially quite sympathetic of their cause.His works have been seminal in the Latin...

Porcelain is a play written and directed by Singapore playwright Chay Yew. The play was released in 1993 in the United Kingdom, and was later moved to the London Royal Theater. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yew said about the play,...

First published 1999, Wonderland is a play by Chay Yew, a gay, Singapore-born American writer of Chinese descent. Along with Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, Wonderland is part of Yew's "Whitelands Trilogy." It was also published in a...

Federico Garcia Lorca was born to a wealthy family in Spain in 1898. He grew up near Grenada where he received an excellent education and excelled as a piano player. After initially hoping to become a musician, Lorca began writing in 1916. Still,...

No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff was published in 1996. The main character is Clare Savage, where the novel follows her life. Clare must find her own identity, and this book shows a coming-of-age theme, where Clare grows up to be herself....

Doctor No is the sixth novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and was first published in 1958. The story centers on Bond's investigation into the disappearance of fellow MI6 operative Commander John Strangeways whilst in Jamaica. He establishes...