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The Shadow Line was one of the last pieces of long prose that Joseph Conrad ever produced. At 30,000 words, it is a long piece, but as to whether it is actually a long short story or a short novel is up for debate. The general consensus is that,...

The Street was written by Ann Petry, an African American author. The novel was published in 1946 and is set during World War II in New York City, specifically Harlem. The protagonist is named Lutie Johnson, who is the single African American...

Horatio Alger was an American writer and an author of more than one hundred books, most of which were written for young readers. His best known work is called Ragged Dick and was published in 1867. The plot of this book follows a formula made so...

The Skull Beneath The Skin is a 1982 detective novel by British crime writer P.D. James and featuring her renowned female private detective Cordelia Gray. The novel is set on fictional Courcy Island on the Dorset Coast, in a Victorian castle that...

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,...

In 1917 Edith Wharton moved out of her fictional comfort zone of life among the New York City elite and took her profound imagination to New England in the novel Summer. Over the course of four months in North Dormer, Massachusetts, a teenage girl...

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...

T’was a plague that gave birth to William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” Between June 1592 and May 1594, acting companies were banished from London and the theater essentially became non-existent. The reason for this was...

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...

The Koran (Qur'an) is the holy scripture of the religion Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad, probably during the sixth or seventh century AD, and likely written over the course of 20-something years, as it was received through the prophecy of...

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 Mezzanine is a 1988 novel by American novelist Nicholson Baker, an author who specializes in "stream of consciousness" style writing, as clearly demonstrated in this story.

The Mezzanine can be most basically summarized as what goes through an...

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...

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...

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 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...

Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...

The Known World earned Edward P. Jones a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shedding light on one of the darkest corners of American history: black slave-owners. The novel is set in Virginia before the Civil War and spans several decades in the life Henry...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....