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The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play that was published in 1941. It is subtitled “A parable play” and is a satirical allegory of Hitler and the Nazis rise to power before World War Two. This play was written by Bertolt Brecht, a German...

The only work written by the ancient Roman historian Livy was a multi-volume history of Rome that modern scholars consider to be long as literary value, but rather wanting in historical fact. At one time the full history written by Livy spanned...

The Return of the Soldier is a novel written by Rebecca West in 1918. The novel revolves around the story of Chris Baldry, an upper class gentleman who has returned from the war to his wife Kitty Baldry. Kitty Baldry is a perfect representation of...

S/Z was published in 1970 and written by Roland Barthes, a French philosopher and writer. Barthes dabbled in quite a few schools of theory, and made significant contributions to quite a few, including semiotics, social theory, anthropology, and,...

The Short Tales of Joseph Conrad is a collection of eight examples of shorter fiction by the esteemed writer of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Conrad was born in Poland and moved to England, where he became a naturalized citizen. Much of his life...

George Lippard wrote The Quaker City with the express purpose of creating a controversial and infamous exposé of criminal underworld of Philadelphia that would be embraced by a scandalized public and perhaps lead to wholesale reform. At least,...

The Misanthrope is one of the most famous works of Molière, a playwright and one of the greatest authors in French literature. The comedy was written during the 17th century and first played on the 4th of June 1666 at the Palais-Royal, a Parisian...

John Berendt comes from a scholarly background, his parents being writers, himself being trained in writing at Harvard University. His career as a journalist bloomed quickly. He was the associate editor of Esquire Magazine, then editor of New York...

Published in 1985, Lonesome Dove would finally bring the Pulitzer Prize to Larry McMurtry. McMurtry was passed over for The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment. Yet the sprawling tale of a cattle drive headed up by two former Texas Rangers...

Mule Bone might well be termed the Great Lost (and Then Found) Play of the Harlem Renaissance. The work began as a collaboration at the height of that African-American artistic movement between two of its brightest stars, Langston Hughes and Nora...

Jonathan Edwards was an American preacher born on October 5, 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was raised in an actively religious household as his father was a minister and his mother was the daughter of a reverend. At only 13-years-old,...

Published by Perugia Press in Massachusetts in 2004, Kettle Bottom is a collection of poems written by Diane Gilliam Fisher, focusing on the 1920 and 1921 West Virginia labor battles.

An author's note at the beginning of the collectionexplains the...

The winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Steven Millhauser is an American author. Born in the 'Big Apple' in 1943, Millhauser has published a number of works of fiction over the course of his career, both in novel and short story format....

Caryl Phillips is a British novelist born on March 13, 1958 in St. Kitts. After graduating from secondary school, he attended Queen’s College at Oxford to study English. His artistic talents were unleashed at university where he directed plays and...

Experimental novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was published in 1972 as a series of “overhead conversations” between Kublai Kahn, Notorious Mongol Emperor and Marco Polo, noted explorer. Although categorized as a novel, that description...

Timothy Garton Ash is a British author and commentator born on July 12, 1955 in London, England. After graduating from the Sherborne School, he attended Exeter College to study Modern History. He later enrolled at St. Antony’s College for graduate...

Miss Lonelyhearts is the second novel from Nathanael West, perhaps most famous for The Day of the Locust. The story of a lonely hearts columnist who becomes personally involved in the lives of some of the people who write to him was inspired by a...

Linden Hills, written by Gloria Naylor, was published in 1985. Though easily understood as a work of social commentary, this novel also references the literary past. The world that Naylor depicts is structured through an extended allegory...

Composed originally in Old French, The Mirror of Simple Souls is a work written in the 14th century by Marguerite Porete about the Christian faith, especially the idea of agape, or divine love. Although it was extremely popular in its time, it was...

The Outlaw Sea is a maritime non-fiction, true crime novel written by William Langewische. It was first published on July 30, 2002. Langewische is an American author and journalist who also worked as an airplane pilot. He also works at the Vanity...

The Utopian Novel has always meant big time readership for those writers capable of coming up with something unique to say about a perfect society. Of course, even better is the anti-utopian bleakness of Dystopian Novel. Overdone by half in the...

AB Yehoshua is an Israeli writer born on December 9, 1936 in Jerusalem. Yehoshua was raised in a very literary family - his father was a historical writer and his mother showered him in books as a child. From 1954 to 1957, he served in the Israeli...

In 1967, Angela Carter won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her novel The Magic Toyshop. The novel is considered an essential component in the evolutionary process in which Carter became a progenitor of a more avant-garde offshoot of Gothic...

The Joys of Motherhood was written by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian-born British author, and published by Allison & Busby in 1979. Emecheta has written and published over twenty works, from novels to plays, each of which delves into the...