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“The Illiterate” is a sonnet by William Meredith first published in The Open Sea and Other Poems in 1958. Meredith was a homosexual writing in the Eisenhower era of coerced and enforced conformity. Thus the illiteracy of the poem’s situated...

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia has been hailed not only as the playwright’s best work but also one of the best works of drama of the 20th century. This comedic, ambitious, moving, and cerebral work spans both time (but not space) and multiple...

Published in 1862, Les Misérables is considered a classic of world literature. A sprawling epics that focuses on the social outcasts of early 19th century France, it is both an homage to the French culture and a compendium of timeless observations...

The French Lieutenant's Woman was John Fowles' third published novel, and it has achieved enduring commercial and critical success.

The novel attracted the attention of critics soon after it was published, and was better received in literary...

The novel The Whisper was written by the British author named Emma Clayton and published in 2012. Emma Clayton is well-known author that wrote numerous children’s books, science fiction books that have as their main characters young men and women...

The Roar is a children's science fiction novel published by author Emma Clayton in 2009, and illustrated by Jim Murray. It was published in Britain in the same year as The Hunger Games was published in the USA, and worthwhile comparisons can be...

Often compared to John Steibeck's rural American masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, Under the Feet of Jesus tells the story of a young migrant worker and her family. Set in the Western United States and spanning a single summer harvest, the novel...

Ransom Riggs is an American novelist born on February 3, 1979 in Maryland. After graduating from Pine View School for the Gifted, he attended Kenyon College to study English literature and later enrolled at the University of Southern California to...

Hollow City is a second book, a continuation of the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children saga. It is an adventure fantasy novel that follows a group of peculiar children running away from wights-evil peculiars who are after their...

Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. As a teenager, she was heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, inspiring her to become an avid reader and writer. Her other...

A Hologram for the King is a 2012 fiction novel by the acclaimed American novelist Dave Eggers. This book was first published in 2012 by McSweeney's, an independent publishing company that was founded by Eggers himself. The novel follows the story...

The Declaration of Independence, the republican form of government outlined in the United States Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, the most illustrious statesmen of America's Revolutionary generation, were all products of the Founding...

Unlike many other works of dystopian science fiction, The Circle is set in a very near future, fitting neatly into the early 21st-century United States sociopolitical world of Google, Wikileaks, big data, and personalized advertisement.

The...

Published in 2009, The Help tells the story of three women who work together to challenge the racial status quo of their day. In Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s, aspiring writer Skeeter Phelan gets a dangerous idea: to write a book about what...

The Street of Crocodiles was written by Bruno Schulz and is a collection of short stories. It was published in 1934, but in Polish. Celina Wisniewska translated the stories into English quite a while later, in 1963. Schulz had trouble publishing...

David Grossman is an Israeli novelist born on January 25, 1954 in Jerusalem, Israel. He grew up with limited means as his father was a librarian. However, it is because of his father that Grossman developed a love for reading and literature. As a...

The Namesake is the first novel by author Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in the UK to Bengali parents and then moved to the USA as a small child. Like her collection of short stories published in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake focuses on...

Dee Brown was an American novelist born on February 28, 1908 in Alberta, Louisiana. He was an avid reader as a child and the book History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was particularly influential in developing...

Published in 1960, The Cricket in Times Square is a children's book that tells the story of a cricket from Connecticut who accidentally comes to New York City after getting stuck on a commuter train. It was written by George Selden and illustrated...

Around the World in Eighty Days is an adventure novel written by renowned French author Jules Verne, published in 1873. It tells the story of Phileas Fogg, a resident of London, who makes a bet with the members of his club that he can...

Allegiant, published in 2013, is the third book in the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. The first two books in the series are titled Divergent and Insurgent. The series has been highly acclaimed and is well-regarded in the Young Adult genre. It...

The Blithedale Romance is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s third novel, one that is sometimes overlooked by readers but is nonetheless considered one of his most critically important works. Hawthorne wrote the novel in 1851 while staying at Horace Mann’s...

Paper Towns is John Green's third novel, published in 2008. It deals with similar elements of his previous works, including the presence of a beautiful yet eccentric female and a gawky, uncertain male. It is compared to his 2005 novel Looking for...

The Watsons Go to Birmingham was the first of Curtis's novels, and is arguably the one he is most remembered for. It was published by Yearling in 1995 and was written primarily for middle-grade readers, typically ages 10 to 13. This novel tells...