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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...

A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).

This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of stories, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway/PEN Award in 2000, and several of the stories appeared in The New Yorker. The title is taken from one of the stories in the...

Julia Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, in 1991 at the age of 41. Built from interrelated stories she had been publishing in magazines and literary reviews throughout the 1980s, it was the first major...

Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...

A Long Way from Chicago was written by Richard Peck, a writer, playwright, and speaker, in 1998 and won a Newbury Honor in 1999. Its sequel, A Year Down Yonder, was published in 2000 and won the Newbery Medal in 2001.

The book tells the story of...

The House of the Spirits (La Casa de los Espíritus) marked Isabel Allende's novelistic debut and the advent of her status as an internationally best-selling author. After spending many years as a journalist, television, and theater writer in Chile...

Written in 1897 and published in 1903, Such Is Life is a novel written by Joseph Furphy. The book is the fictional diary of the protagonist and narrator Tom Collins. Taking place in Australia, the diary recounts the lives of the people who live in...

For the Term of His Natural Life is a book written by English-born Australian author Marcus Clarke. It was written in the middle 1870s and is part novel, part history book and gives a vivid and realistic account of the brutality of the colonial...

First published in 1966 by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian author, A Jest of God tells of a 34-year-old schoolteacher named Rachel Cameron who lives with her mother.

Rachel feels trapped in the deceit and pettiness of her small town that includes...

Anyone who has seen the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon has already also read it…to a point. The most famous and beloved film version of the story of Sam Spade on the trail of the black bird is actually one of...

Dennis Scott was born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in 1939. He was educated at Jamaica College, and later at the University of the West Indies, where he received a B.A. in English. a He published his first collection of poetry in 1973. The...

Mother Night is based on personal experience, for it is a well-known fact that Vonnegut saw the horrors of the war with his own eyes. This work was published in 1961, for it took him some time to reflect on his role in the war. He also knew about...

The Last of the Mohicans takes place in the midst of the French-Indian war. Specifically, it focuses on one battle in a war that lasted for many years. This was the last and most important conflict over French and British possessions in North...

Hunters in the Snow and Other Stories, also published as The Stories of Tobias Wolff, is a collection of short stories by Professor Tobias Wolff at the University of Stanford. The collection was first published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

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They Cage the Animals at Night is an autobiography, written by Jennings Michael Burch. Burch was left at an orphanage when he was eight, and his mother, who was too sick to adequately take care of him, did not come back. At his young age, Burch...

Water For Elephants is an historical novel by Sara Gruen. It was written as part of National Novel Writing Month. Gruen has said that the backbone of her story parallels the biblical story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis.

The unusual title comes...

All Souls: A Family Story From Southie is an autobiographical memoir written by Michael Patrick MacDonald and published by Beacon Press in September 1999. The writing recounts MacDonald's growing up in the Old Colony Housing Projects in South...

John Charles Chasteen, born in 1955, is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Rejecting much of the neocolonialist depictions of Latin America commonly found in history texts, he saw a need for a textbook that presented Latin...

The Second Treatise of Government was published amidst the turmoil and upheaval of late-17th century English politics. In 1690 when it anonymously entered the canon of great works of political theory, the absolute monarch King James II had been...

Charlotte Temple was Susanna Rowson's second novel, and her first to receive financial success. The novel is a didactic melodrama, intended to teach young women how to behave honorably and avoid falling in with unsavory people, whether they be men...

Bertolt Brecht wrote Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (translated literally as “The Good Person of Setzuan”) with Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau between the years of 1938 and 1943. Steffin was a German actress, writer, and translator, and Brecht's...

Like Water for Chocolate, published in 1989, is Laura Esquivel’s first novel. Part cookbook, part fiction, this best-selling work retells the story of the De la Garza family with a specific focus on Tita de la Garza. Every chapter begins with a...

The Emigrants was written by Winfried Georg Sebald, which was first published during 1992 and was later published during 2002 by Vintage. This story plainly documents the lives of four German/Jewish emigrants during the twentieth century. Sebald's...