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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Steven Millhauser is an American author. Born in the 'Big Apple' in 1943, Millhauser has published a number of works of fiction over the course of his career, both in novel and short story format....

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) was an important Ancient Roman poet. He was closely integrated into Roman society, as he joined Brutus' army, before becoming a highly respected scribe and poet. He was also well educated, as he studied in Rome as...

The title characters the film Eight Men Out are those eight ballplayers for the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were banned from baseball for allegedly throwing the World Series. When you hear the story of the team that came to be referred to as the...

Spawning a highly successful movie adaption, Eight Men Out is a sports novel written by Eliot Asinof and published in 1963. It is his most popular work.

Eight Men Out centers around the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, when eight members of the Chicago...

Meena Alexander's Fault Lines was first published in 1993 and expanded in 2003. It is a memoir that, like many of Alexander's other works, focuses primarily on "trauma, migration, and memory," as well as trauma's "impact on subjectivity, and the...

Despair is Vladimir Nabokov's novel in Russian, first published in the Paris émigré journal "Contemporary notes" in 1934. In 1936, it was published as a book in the publishing house "Petropolis" in Berlin.

Despair is the sixth Russian novel...

Demons is the sixth novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published in 1871-1872. It’s one of the most politicized novels, which Dostoevsky wrote under the impression from the occurrence of shoots of the terrorist and radical movements among the...

Marivaux, French writer of the 18th century composed The Game of Love and Chance, a three-act romantic comedy that was first displayed on January the 23rd of 1730 by the Théâtre-Italien in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, one of the most famous Parisian...

History of Rome, or Roman History, is a series of 80 books which chronicles the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229 C.E., six years before the author’s death. The books were written over the course of 22 years...

Following hard upon the Valentine that was Bela Lugosi’s immensely popular portrayal of Count Dracula, Universal Studios execs were doubtlessly giving thanks nine months and a week later for the early Christmas gift that was Boris Karloff’s...

Fall on Your Knees is a novel written by Ann-Marie MacDonald and was first published in 1996 in Canada but then republished on October 2002 by Pocket books.

The novel follows the life of the Piper Family throughout the 19th and 20th century. The...

In The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby arguably argues that the idea of politics itself is coming to an end altogether. In a political contest, he states, people compete in viewpoints for the best wave of the future. However, everyone has already...

Doctor Faustus is the Thomas Mann’s novel. It had been started in 1943 and published 4 years later with the title: “The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend”.

Doctor Faustus is the most significant and large-scale work of...

In between the more famous Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck published what may be viewed as a trial run for his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In Dubious Battle is also set in California and is also concerned with migrant...