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“Tobermory” was first published in 1909 in The Westminster Gazette. The original version of the story did not include the character Clovis. The story was later revised for book publication and the revised version incorporated Clovis, a character...

“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was originally published in the Saturday Press in 1865 before appearing two years later in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. The story can present something of a prickly problem for old-fashioned...

Sandra Cisneros is a novelist and short story author of Mexican-American descent, who was published several acclaimed works including The House on Mango Street and Woman Holler Creek and Other Stories.. She was born into a large family in Chicago...

St. Benedict founded the Benedictine monastic order, which settled in a community on a hill about 75 miles southeast of Rome called Monte Cassino. It was there that he and his fellow monks destroyed a pagan temple honoring Apollo and built a...

Queen Elizabeth I gave this speech to her troops in August 1588, as they were gathered at Tilbury, Essex, one of the counties in the East Anglia region of England and one of the mainstays in the Tudor kingdom and very close to London. Her troops...

Gilead is Marilynne Robinson’s second and most famous work. Published in 2004, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robinson based her novel on real places and real people. Gilead, while fictional,...

That was Then, This is Now was published in 1971. Its title is derived from one of the pivotal lines of the book. It is set in the same world as The Outsiders, which was published 4 years before it in 1967, and even features a brief overlap of...

Published in 1935, Untouchable is Mulk Raj Anand’s first major novel. The novel’s format is very simple—it follows the day in the life of an “untouchable,” a member of India’s lowest social caste. Despite its simplicity, Untouchable is a powerful...

Maugham's story of an unfaithful woman who follows her husband into a cholera epidemic and ultimately earns redemption was inspired by a story in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Purgatorio section of the Comedy contains the lines "Pray, when you...

Childhood’s End is one of Arthur C. Clarke’s most popular and critically acclaimed works, and a mainstay of 20th century science fiction. Published by Ballantine in 1953, it began with the short story “The Guardian Angel," published in Famous...

Go Tell It on the Mountain is Baldwin's first major work as an author and skyrocketed him into literary stardom upon publication in 1952. Semi-autobiographical, the book mirrors the troubled relationship Baldwin had with his own stepfather;...

Published in February 2014, Atlantia is a powerful coming-of-age-story about finding one's voice. Rio is a sixteen-year-old girl living in Atlantia, a city built underwater to preserve human life after the surface of the earth was rendered...

Mark Salzman's book Lying Awake won critical acclaim upon publication in 2000. Salon Magazine marveled that a successful agnostic at home amidst the cultural elite could write a book like Lying Awake, especially after struggling for six...

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy was published in two volumes by Lawrence Sterne in 1768. It is considered a significant work of English literature because it is one of the earliest entries in the genre of travel writing, which...

The Fault in Our Stars is John Green's sixth novel. Green drew inspiration from his time working as a chaplain at a children's hospital and from his friendship with Esther Earl, a friend of Green's to whom the book is dedicated.

The book was...

This selection of bleak stories features some of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s most acclaimed short works. Although they were not published together during his lifetime, they hold together as a collection of his earlier and most corrosively modernist...

With its depictions of demonic rites and illicit sexuality, The Monk ignited a firestorm of controversy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an impassioned but very mixed review of the novel; though he thought that some elements (such the...

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague was written by author and journalist Geraldine Brooks. It was published in 2011 and was chosen as both a New York Times and a Washington Post Notable Book. This novel is based on the true story of the village...

The Trials of Brother Jero was first published in 1964. Its original performance was organized by Farris-Belgrave Productions and held at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City in 1967. Today it is known as one of Soyinka’s most popular...

Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is one of the playwright’s most intriguing early works, and is exemplary of his desire to unite the modern and the ancient Greek. Written and first performed in 1924, it is influenced by the stories of...

The Moonstone was written in 1868, published in the middle of Wilkie Collins’s career as a writer. It was written after his first major success in The Woman in White (1860), yet, alongside with the 1860 sensation novel, The Moonstone is Collins’s...

Penpal is the first novel by Dathan Auerbach. Auerbach did not originally set out to write a book; he began by posting macabre short stories on a subreddit called "nosleep". The first of these was "Footsteps" and he received such a positive...

Published in 2000, House of Leaves is the first novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. The book was aa huge success upon release, being translated into multiple other languages. One strange thing that makes the book stand out is its structure, a great...

Scottish writer Iain Banks is one of the most famous in the world among contemporary novelists. Critics regard him highly, and rightly so, in early 1999, according to a survey on the website of BBC News Banks got to the fifth place in the top ten...