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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...

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...

Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...

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 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....

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...

Luigi Pirandello is far better known as a dramatist with a fondness for exploring themes related to masks, disguises and the various personae that people choose to wear or have forced upon them. In fact, the very first major literary work in which...

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,...

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...

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...

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 Name of the Rose is the first novel of Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980.

The novel is presented as an embodiment of the theoretical ideas of Umberto Eco’...

The Satires are a compilation of the Roman author Juvenal’s satirical poems. Juvenal is known to have five books of sixteen total poems, all of which are considered satirical in the Roman genres, discussing society and morals in dactylic...

Author Brian Moore was born Belfast, had immigrated first to Canada and then the United States, and published several potboiler pulp fiction novels under a pen name before finally staking the claim to serious novelist using his own name for which...

Demons is the sixth novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published in 1871-1872. It’s one of the most politicized novels, which Dostoevsky wrote under the impression from the occurrence of shoots of the terrorist and radical movements among the...

The Enigma of Arrival is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul. The story tells of a young man from Trinidad who makes his way to England, and the novel thus encompasses themes related to the post-colonialism and imperialistic impact...

History of Rome, or Roman History, is a series of 80 books which chronicles the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229 C.E., six years before the author’s death. The books were written over the course of 22 years...

The genesis of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame can be traced back to a single word. That word was “fate” written in Greek and carved into a wall on one the Notre Dame cathedral towers. From that chance discovery did the author...

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche diverge significantly from the collected works of most other philosophers. Although certain concepts and theories recur with frequently and ideas are repeated often enough to become motifs, Nietzsche’s writings...

Doctor Zhivago has one of the strangest stories of publication in modern fiction. Written by Russian author Boris Pasternak, the book was initially published in Italy in 1957 and would not become available inside the Soviet Union for years....

Despair is Vladimir Nabokov's novel in Russian, first published in the Paris émigré journal "Contemporary notes" in 1934. In 1936, it was published as a book in the publishing house "Petropolis" in Berlin.

Despair is the sixth Russian novel...

Marcel Proust’s life-consuming literary epic is not just merely one novel, but a series of books. Throughout the 20th century, this collection of volumes was more often than not referred to by the collective title of Remembrance of Things Past....

Gertrude Stein was an American author, and one of America's most well-known expatriates. Although born in the United States, Stein moved around as a child and eventually settled down in France, believing that Paris was the ideal place to create...

In The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby arguably argues that the idea of politics itself is coming to an end altogether. In a political contest, he states, people compete in viewpoints for the best wave of the future. However, everyone has already...