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A Bildungsroman (coming of age) story about a black boy growing up in America, The White Boy Shuffle is the debut novel of American author and poet Paul Beatty. Published in 1996, the book is acclaimed for its insight into African-American culture...

Jasper Fforde was born in London, England and spent almost twenty years working in the film industry. He worked on movies which included Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. His desire to become a novelist and create his own works, drove...

Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, published in 1861, is unique among George Eliot's writings for its brevity and its apparent allegorical clarity. The novel is only slightly longer than the short stories that Eliot published in her first work,...

Jane Austen wrote Northhanger Abbey while she was residing in her childhood home in Steventon, England, but the novel is largely set in the resort town of Bath, where Austen visited for a month-long vacation in 1797. Originally entitled Susan, the...

Samuel Richardson may have based his first novel on the story of a real-life affair between Hannah Sturges, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coachman, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Baronet of Northampton, whom she married in 1725. He certainly based...

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise are a series of letters written in Latin in the twelfth century and published in Paris in 1616. From then, the letters sped all over Europe and were translated anonymously into various languages. The letters tell...

Cousin Bette is a narrative of a famous French realist-writer Honore de Balzac written in 1846. The main theme of the book is the display of disastrous consequences of dependent and humiliating position of a poor relative for a person’s character....

The National Book Award for Fiction winner in 1990 was Middle Passage by Charles Johnson. The title is a reference to the long and often terrifying transport of African slaves across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. The...

Push by Sapphire tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones, a 16-year-old overweight, impoverished girl living in the slums of Harlem. At the start of the novel, Claireece is pregnant with her second child, a result of the sexual abuse she...

José Saramago’s 1997 novel, All the Names, translated through Margaret Jull Costa, is a profound exploration of identity, bureaucracy, loneliness, and the imperative human want for connection. Set in an unnamed city, the narrative facilities on...

Published in 1976--the year America was celebrating all the nice history making up its bicentennial--Flight to Canada is a parody or satire or pastiche of the slave narrative by Ishmael Reed that draws attention to the inherent flaws in a genre...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published her first volume of poetry when she was just 16, carved out fame on the anti-slavery lecture circuit by publically speaking on the subject in excess of two hours without consulting a written text or notes and...

Published in 1900, The House Behind the Cedars was the first published novel by Charles Chesnutt. One of the testaments to the status that the African-African writer had achieved after a career of highly regarded short stories published in the...

La Chanson de Roland, or The Song of Roland, is the oldest surviving French poem. It is also the oldest and greatest of the chansons de geste, medieval epic poems written in French. In old French, "geste" means a deed or action, often of heroic...

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is a 1846 work of travel literature by Herman Melville. Typee was both Melville’s first book and his most popular during his lifetime.

Typee is a blend of fiction and nonfiction which has frustrated critics for...

Rifles for Watie is a 1957 children’s novel about the American Civil War. Unlike most historical fiction works regarding the same topic, Rifles for Watie takes place west of the Mississippi River. The book also includes characters based on real...

Look Back in Anger is considered one of the most important plays in the modern British theater. It was the first well-known example of "Kitchen Sink drama," a style of theater that explored the emotion and drama beneath the surface of ordinary...

At Fault is Kate Chopin’s first novel which was written between July 1889 and April 1890. Upon completion, she submitted it to Bedford’s Monthly; a literary journal that made room for one novel in each issue. Upon rejection, Chopin decided to...

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Background David Hume published An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748. He was a respected empiricist philosopher, meaning he believed that all thought is based upon experience. Credited with...

The Birds premiered at the theater of Dionysus at Athens as part of the festival taking place in that city in what would have been March of 414 B.C. As proof that some things never change, today this comedy is generally agreed to be one of the...

The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair’s failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before...

Tristram Shandy is, almost beyond argument, the most unusual, outrageously experimental and subversive novel that most people who possess basic literacy skills could ever read. While James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake definitely outstrips this novel in...

Geoffrey Trease is a well-known twentieth century poet and children's novelist. He has a prolific career which is dominated by his historical fiction. Revered for his candid approach to history for children, he presents historical settings in his...

The Lottery and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-five of Shirley Jackson's short stories, plus an epilogue. This collection was first named The Lottery--Adventures of the Daemon Lover by Jackson. The collection was first published in 1949...