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Comparable to the Odyssey or the Bible, the Ramayana is a classic of world literature. The poem details the adventures of Prince Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, along with his devoted wife Sita and his dear brother Lakshmana. Written in...

How To Read English Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, published by HarperCollins in 2003, was well-received by audiences, and continues to enjoy a place on the New York Times bestseller list for...

Cannery Row (1945) is one of John Steinbeck's most beloved novels. Its mixture of tones and themes, memorable characters, and ability to capture and convey the essence of a place in time has made it a favorite of both readers and critics alike.

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An Essay Upon Projects was the very first work of literature to which Daniel Defoe publicly signed his name as author. Lacking neither ambition nor audaciousness, the essays lays out over the court of more 50,000 words a detailed and comprehensive...

The Way of the World premiered in 1700 at London's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Field, performed by Majesty's Servants, an acting company of the time. Though it is now regarded as one of the best Restoration comedies in existence, it was not well...

Up from Slavery is the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, one of the most prominent black leaders of the post-civil War era. Originally published in Outlook magazine in serial form, it was translated into 18 languages and is one of the...

One of the three novels by Yasunari Kawabata that the Nobel Committee cited in awarding him the Nobel Literature Prize in 1968, Snow Country is one of the famous writer's best and most well known works. Set in a remote hot spring town in the "snow...

Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is famous not just for its amusing, allegorical content, but also because it has the distinction of being the only surviving Roman novel in its entirety. It was published in the 2nd century CE and has endured as a classic...

Described by fans as a cross between Game of Thrones and X-Men, The Young Elites is the first book of author Marie Lu’s latest trilogy. It is an epic fantasy set in an alternate world that has a medieval European feel. Amongst its contemporaries...

Ally Condie primarily drew inspiration for Matched from a conversation she and her husband had over dinner one night in late 2008. He posed the question: what if someone wrote the perfect algorithm for matching people with one another, and the...

The History Boys is one of Alan Bennett’s most celebrated plays. The narrative is heavily inspired by Bennett's own experiences in school and the process through which he gained entrance to Oxford. Bennett says, “[The play draws] on some of the...

The Garden of Forking Paths is a collection of eight short stories by Borges, published in late 1941 by the Argentinian journal Sur. It is the most famous collection of his work, in particular because of its title story, which gained international...

Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. At this point, Dahl had been writing for some time and his timeless work James and the Giant Peach had already been published. This novel, however, is Dahl’s most well known. It is...

Milos Forman's film, Amadeus, was critically acclaimed and a commercial success upon its release in 1984. At the 57th Academy Awards, the film won eight of the eleven nominations that it received. The wins included Best Director, Best Actor (F....

We is the most renowned work of Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin and one of the most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century.

Although the novel was completed in 1921 and published in the US in 1924, it was not published in its country of...

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is perhaps Joyce Carol Oates most widely read and anthologized short story, and, as one critic wrote, “justly so” (Gale 257). First published in the 1996 edition of the journal Epoch and later reprinted...

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is one of Samuel Johnson’s most famous works and his only novel. Styled as a parable or essay as much as a novel (it has been referred to, at times, as a “moral fable,” a “philosophical romance,” and a...

The Sandman, written in in 1817, is one of Hoffmann's most well known stories.

Sigmund Freud gave an interpretation of the story in his essay "The Uncanny," written almost 100 years later in 1919. The essay uses the story to help define a literary...

D.H. Lawrence spent the last five years of his life in Europe, mostly in Italy, where he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. He had left England in 1919, following a stance of non-participation in World War I. (He was deemed physically unfit to be...

The Portrait of a Lady is considered one of Henry James' best works, and it was his first large commercial success. The book was published in serial installments simultaneously in MacMillan's Magazine (in England) and the Atlantic. Up until this...

First published in 1861, Utilitarianism constituted Mill's fullest treatment of the moral theory that was responsible for much of his philosophy. Following in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham, in this work Mill provides the capstone paper outlining...

Seabiscuit is the story of a very unlikely champion race horse and the three men who worked tirelessly to help him fulfil his deeply hidden potential. He was undersized with a lopsided gallop and a combative attitude when it came to being trained....

Dave Eggers is an American novelist born on March 12, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in a very scholarly and academia-focused family as his father was an attorney and his mother a teacher. After graduating high school, he attended...

Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Grey on January 31, 1872. Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship and studied dentistry. It was his dream, however, to become a writer. Grey taught himself how to write and worked...