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When you set your novel in a California town called Ithaca and you give your characters names like Homer and Ulysses, you had better be making some sort of effort to tie your story in with the ancient myths of yore. Lots of writers have attempted...

Delmore Schwartz first wrote the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" in July 1935, when he was twenty-one years old. The story was first published in the Partisan Review in 1937, in the first issue following the publication's...

Published in 1894, George Moore’s groundbreaking experiment in pushing the boundaries of Naturalism in English-language fiction presents a stark portrait of both how much things have changed in the past century or so and how little things have...

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is a play by Tomson Highway. It was nominated for a Governor General's Award along with nomination for Dora Mavor Moore Awards (presented by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts) including Best New Play...

John Dewey originally published The Public and Its Problems in 1927. The release of a new edition in 1946 added a subtitle—An Essay in Political Enquiry—as well as the addition of an introduction to the original’s short preface. That preface...

Austerlitz was authored by German writer Winfred Georg Maximilian Sebald (W.G. Sebald). This novel tells the story of a young boy, named Jacques Austerlitz, sent to England in 1939 and placed with foster parents. This couple was quick to rid the...

The rise of Christianity from a small pack of wandering nonconformists to worldwide influence has not been kind to the literary traditions of cultures it gobbled up in its determined trek up through Europe in the first millennia. By the 1100s,...

The Autobiography of My Mother, first published in 1996, is a novel written by Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in the capital city of St. John’s, Antigua. She is the author of...

After a career that had produced some of the defining works of the America stage, Tennessee Williams finally wrote what would the last of his plays to be considered a work of distinction appropriately situated alongside A Streetcar Named Desire...

The Magus is the first novel that John Fowles actually penned, although it would only be published after two subsequent efforts were completed. Fowles is perhaps most famous for later writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Anyone who has read that...

Angels and Demons (2000) is a mystery novel by Dan Brown who is well known for literary techniques that are well displayed in Angels and Demons, such as mysterious investigations into conspiracy theories and explorations in corrupt religious...

Isak Dinesen is a pen name of Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke, a Danish author who published under several other pseudonyms over the course of her career. Dinesen was multilingual and translated most of her own works--she wrote ...

The Tin Flute is a novel written by Gabrielle Roy. This work is her first novel, and it was published originally in French in 1945. It was originally named Bonheur D’occasion, which translates into chance, or secondhand happiness.

It was...

The Stone Carvers was written by Jane Urquhart and published in 2001. Urquhart’s works often include themes of art and the characters are often artists. In The Stone Carvers, the protagonist is not only an artist but also a woman whose name is...

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is a 1694 book by English writer Mary Astell which outlines Astell’s plan for an all-female college where women would receive a religious and secular education on par with that of their male counterparts. Astell’s...

"Pyramid of Bone" is a poem written by Thylias Moss and published in 1989. Most of Moss's poems discuss race and gender, but "Lessons From A Mirror", part of "Pyramid of Bone", discusses other sad aspects of life. The poem talks about what it is...

There is an old saying about how some people may only do one thing, but do it well. Such is the case with Thucydides. As a historian, he may have been more than a touch obsessive: his entire historical literature output comes down to a single...

Judith Guest is an American novelist born in Detroit, Michigan in 1936. She studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan, and these two areas of study come heavily into play throughout her book, Ordinary People.

Guest’s novel...

On Chesil Beach is a novel written by Ian McEwan about the changes in society on an example of the newlyweds, who had married in the early 1960s, before the sexual revolution. The novel was published in Britain in 2007.

An English society of the...

My Sister's Keeperis a novel written by Jodi Picoult in 2004 and revolves around a 13-year old girl called Anna Fitzgerald who was born for the purpose of aiding her sister in her recovery from leukemia by donating cells and organs.

Kate...

Monkeys, written by Susan Minot, was published in 1986. It takes place on the coast of New England. The Vincent children have all lived a neglected life, but as a family, they pull together to become one again. This narrative is about how they...

To fully appreciate the poetry of Mary Oliver, one needs to understand what drives her to compose verse. Fortunately, she has made this easy to accomplish by putting everything into succinct perspective: “I write poems for a stranger who will be...

Eva Hoffman was born Ewa Wydra in Krakow, Poland in 1945, just two months after the end of World War II. Her parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Ukraine and hiding in a forest bunker, later being hidden for another...

Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler was the sixth collection of poetry published by American writer Thylias Moss in 1998. Moss was born in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio to parents of mixed racial identities. Her childhood included instances of witnessing...