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Some historians are destined to be read while others are destined to become omnipresent through throughout the literature of others as footnotes and references. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War considered the ultimate source for that...

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was born to a doctor and his wife in the northern French town of Rouen. Like Frederic in his 1869 novel Sentimental Education, Flaubert studied law in Paris as a young man. Like Freredic, he also never practiced law....

The Subterraneans was published in 1958. It was written by the famous Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation is a group of writers who started publishing their works and gaining popularity after World War II, around the 1950s....

The Pioneers was published in 1823 and holds a significant place in American letters: it is the novel that launched the famous Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. This is the book that introduced the world to Natty Bumppo, one of the...

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...

Mark Twain asserted that his literary hybrid Roughing It was nothing more than a simple personal narrative, absent any intent to present that account as history or philosophy. Well, Mark Twain said a lot of things, some of them not to be trusted....

T’was a plague that gave birth to William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” Between June 1592 and May 1594, acting companies were banished from London and the theater essentially became non-existent. The reason for this was...

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,...

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a collection of sequential short stories that was published first in 1912. They were written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian political scientist and writer, who was one of the most famous humorists in the world...

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a novel written by Yukio Mishima, published in Japanese in 1963.

Yukio Mishima is a representative of the Japanese literature, an absolute world classic and writer, descending into the abyss of hell...

The Political Writings of John Locke is a collection of a few of Locke’s most important works that was edited by David Wootton, a professor of history and expert on English speaking countries, and others, such as France and Italy. The Political...

The Misanthrope is one of the most famous works of Molière, a playwright and one of the greatest authors in French literature. The comedy was written during the 17th century and first played on the 4th of June 1666 at the Palais-Royal, a Parisian...

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 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’...

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...

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,...

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 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...

Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...

Luigi Pirandello is far better known as a dramatist with a fondness for exploring themes related to masks, disguises and the various personae that people choose to wear or have forced upon them. In fact, the very first major literary work in which...

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...

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...

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...

Linden Hills, written by Gloria Naylor, was published in 1985. Though easily understood as a work of social commentary, this novel also references the literary past. The world that Naylor depicts is structured through an extended allegory...