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The Shadow Line was one of the last pieces of long prose that Joseph Conrad ever produced. At 30,000 words, it is a long piece, but as to whether it is actually a long short story or a short novel is up for debate. The general consensus is that,...

The Skull Beneath The Skin is a 1982 detective novel by British crime writer P.D. James and featuring her renowned female private detective Cordelia Gray. The novel is set on fictional Courcy Island on the Dorset Coast, in a Victorian castle that...

Miss Lonelyhearts is the second novel from Nathanael West, perhaps most famous for The Day of the Locust. The story of a lonely hearts columnist who becomes personally involved in the lives of some of the people who write to him was inspired by a...

John Berendt comes from a scholarly background, his parents being writers, himself being trained in writing at Harvard University. His career as a journalist bloomed quickly. He was the associate editor of Esquire Magazine, then editor of New York...

AB Yehoshua is an Israeli writer born on December 9, 1936 in Jerusalem. Yehoshua was raised in a very literary family - his father was a historical writer and his mother showered him in books as a child. From 1954 to 1957, he served in the Israeli...

In 1967, Angela Carter won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her novel The Magic Toyshop. The novel is considered an essential component in the evolutionary process in which Carter became a progenitor of a more avant-garde offshoot of Gothic...

The Koran (Qur'an) is the holy scripture of the religion Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad, probably during the sixth or seventh century AD, and likely written over the course of 20-something years, as it was received through the prophecy of...

Experimental novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was published in 1972 as a series of “overhead conversations” between Kublai Kahn, Notorious Mongol Emperor and Marco Polo, noted explorer. Although categorized as a novel, that description...

Composed originally in Old French, The Mirror of Simple Souls is a work written in the 14th century by Marguerite Porete about the Christian faith, especially the idea of agape, or divine love. Although it was extremely popular in its time, it was...

Timothy Garton Ash is a British author and commentator born on July 12, 1955 in London, England. After graduating from the Sherborne School, he attended Exeter College to study Modern History. He later enrolled at St. Antony’s College for graduate...

The Known World earned Edward P. Jones a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shedding light on one of the darkest corners of American history: black slave-owners. The novel is set in Virginia before the Civil War and spans several decades in the life Henry...

The Satires are a compilation of the Roman author Juvenal’s satirical poems. Juvenal is known to have five books of sixteen total poems, all of which are considered satirical in the Roman genres, discussing society and morals in dactylic...

The Utopian Novel has always meant big time readership for those writers capable of coming up with something unique to say about a perfect society. Of course, even better is the anti-utopian bleakness of Dystopian Novel. Overdone by half in the...

The Name of the Rose is the first novel of Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980.

The novel is presented as an embodiment of the theoretical ideas of Umberto Eco’...

Published in 1985, Lonesome Dove would finally bring the Pulitzer Prize to Larry McMurtry. McMurtry was passed over for The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. Yet the sprawling tale of a cattle drive headed up by two former Texas Rangers...

Jonathan Edwards was an American preacher born on October 5, 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was raised in an actively religious household as his father was a minister and his mother was the daughter of a reverend. At only 13-years-old,...

Caryl Phillips is a British novelist born on March 13, 1958 in St. Kitts. After graduating from secondary school, he attended Queen’s College at Oxford to study English. His artistic talents were unleashed at university where he directed plays and...

Published by Perugia Press in Massachusetts in 2004, Kettle Bottom is a collection of poems written by Diane Gilliam Fisher, focusing on the 1920 and 1921 West Virginia labor battles.

An author's note at the beginning of the collectionexplains the...

Mule Bone might well be termed the Great Lost (and Then Found) Play of the Harlem Renaissance. The work began as a collaboration at the height of that African-American artistic movement between two of its brightest stars, Langston Hughes and Nora...

Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...

The Mezzanine is a 1988 novel by American novelist Nicholson Baker, an author who specializes in "stream of consciousness" style writing, as clearly demonstrated in this story.

The Mezzanine can be most basically summarized as what goes through an...

The Joys of Motherhood was written by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian-born British author, and published by Allison & Busby in 1979. Emecheta has written and published over twenty works, from novels to plays, each of which delves into the...

Author Brian Moore was born Belfast, had immigrated first to Canada and then the United States, and published several potboiler pulp fiction novels under a pen name before finally staking the claim to serious novelist using his own name for which...

The Outlaw Sea is a maritime non-fiction, true crime novel written by William Langewische. It was first published on July 30, 2002. Langewische is an American author and journalist who also worked as an airplane pilot. He also works at the Vanity...