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Crow, a book of poetry by Ted Hughes, was published in 1970 by the esteemed British publisher Faber and Faber. It is widely considered one of Hughes' most important works. Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow marks the second phase of Hughes'...

Playwright Eugene Ionesco once provided a definition of his favorite mode of literary examination that positively overflows with existential weight: “The Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.” Some would suggest that every time Ionesco put...

The orations of the Roman lawyer Cicero are still available and read today because rhetorical arguments were very highly regarded. As an attorney presenting his arguments, Cicero would be called upon to display his oratorical skills outdoors in a...

Cards On The Table is a detective novel written by Agatha Christie published in England in 1936, and published in the USA the following year. The novel "stars" one of Christie's two beloved sleuths, Hercule Poirot, renowned Belgian detective. Not...

Continental Drift is the fourth novel from Russell Banks and marks the turning point of his career. The novel earned Banks the John Dos Passos Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer...

Margery Kempe is a historic figure who lived in England between 1373 and 1438 and remained in history because of her writings and her religious beliefs. While Kempe was never formally made a saint by the Catholic Church she is named a Christian...

In the 1890s, a family immigrated into America from Poland. Anzia Yezierska recalls the stress and strife of living her with relatives among other Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side in Bread Givers. Published in 1925, the book...

The Big Sea is a novel written by Langston Hughes in 1993 and is an autobiography of the author. The story revolves around the life of the author, Langston Hughes, who grows up in America and faces the same challenges as those brought upon other...

Call it Sleep is a fictitious novel written by Henry Roth and follows the life of a young Jewish boy who lives in the Lower East Side of New York. The book was published in 1934 by Robert O. Ballou's publishing company.

The story follows David...

Published in 1901, Buddenbrooks was 26-year-old Thomas Mann’s first novel and the work that set his career on a relentlessly inevitable path toward winning the Nobel Prize twenty-eight years later. The story covers four generations of the titular...

Big Sur was written by Jack Kerouac in 1962. The book was published five years after his novel On the Road put him and the Beat Generation in the national spotlight.

The “Beat” in Beat Generation was defined by Kerouac himself as having several...

The occupants of a British manor house usually become the focus of a novel due to whatever particular machinations are at work to drive the narrative. Those machinations usually range from throwing suspicion of a murder onto one another in order...

Childhood and Society, written by Psychologist Erik Erikson entails what is considered to be one of the most important studies in child psychology. In this book, Erikson studied the social factors and experiences that shape the child’s...

Clay’s Ark is the last of five novels which comprise Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster series of science fiction tales. The series that commence in 1976 was brought to a close with a book which gestated and was born during a very difficult period for...

Blues for Mister Charlie was written by James Baldwin for an express purpose. That purpose was education: the education of white America on the subject of the black experience in America. The epicenter of that black experience was Emmitt Till, a...

It is entirely within the realm of possibility that without Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the world would never have gotten to read Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora. At least, not exactly in the same form that it takes as a result of a world in which...

The publication of Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories catapulted her to the front ranks of major writers of short fiction. What her previous collection Like Life promised, the arrival in 1998 of Birds of America confirmed. Though she...

Ariel is the second full-length collection of poetry written by Sylvia Plath, published in 1965. The poems in Ariel were largely written in the weeks preceding Plath's infamous death by suicide in 1963 and explore the themes of despair, rebirth,...

The novel 2001: A Space Odyssey was written by Arthur C. Clarke in the year 1968. The novel is the result of the collective effort of both Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick but only Clarke appears as the author of the book.

The novel is based...

Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) was a Jamaican-American writer, scholar, and critic whose works focused deeply on race, gender, identity, and postcolonial struggles. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and later moved with her family to New York City....

Here’s a timed quiz for you: name a memorable African-American female character living in the post-Civil War era from American Literature published before the Civil Rights Movement that wasn’t either a mammy, a prostitute or an ill-fated jazz...

Anagrams is the first novel by acclaimed short story writer Lorrie Moore. Published in 1986, the novel is attempt to transfer the concept of anagrammatic rearrangement from letters to characters. Moore has described the work as a “cubist novel”...

Anticlaudianus was written by French theologian and poet Alain de Lille. This lengthy, symbolic poem is about creation as well as the edification of the human soul by God, nature, theology, and philosophy. Alain is also well-known for another poem...

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a collection of short stories written by Robert Olen Butler documenting the lives of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States of America. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.

The stories...