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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....

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...

In between the more famous Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck published what may be viewed as a trial run for his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In Dubious Battle is also set in California and is also concerned with migrant...

Marivaux, French writer of the 18th century composed The Game of Love and Chance, a three-act romantic comedy that was first displayed on January the 23rd of 1730 by the Théâtre-Italien in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, one of the most famous Parisian...

The title characters the film Eight Men Out are those eight ballplayers for the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were banned from baseball for allegedly throwing the World Series. When you hear the story of the team that came to be referred to as the...

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....

Following hard upon the Valentine that was Bela Lugosi’s immensely popular portrayal of Count Dracula, Universal Studios execs were doubtlessly giving thanks nine months and a week later for the early Christmas gift that was Boris Karloff’s...

Fall on Your Knees is a novel written by Ann-Marie MacDonald and was first published in 1996 in Canada but then republished on October 2002 by Pocket books.

The novel follows the life of the Piper Family throughout the 19th and 20th century. The...

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...

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...

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...

Published in 1943, Four Quartets is a group of four poems released separately and written by T.S. Eliot. Many of the poems in the collection were admired by critics, but other writers considered them to be too religious in nature. The collection...

The year was 1919. Herman Hesse already published four novels. His fifth novel, Demian, would be published using a pen name, Emil Sinclair. Sinclair would go on to win the Theodore Fontane Prize for Best Debut Novel of the Year for Demian. Hesse...

Doctor Faustus is the Thomas Mann’s novel. It had been started in 1943 and published 4 years later with the title: “The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend”.

Doctor Faustus is the most significant and large-scale work of...

The short story that many students and reader confront under the title “The Grand Inquisitor” was, is and likely always will be a fully integrated yet curiously independent standalone chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In any other definitive...

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) was an important Ancient Roman poet. He was closely integrated into Roman society, as he joined Brutus' army, before becoming a highly respected scribe and poet. He was also well educated, as he studied in Rome as...

If when reading Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country one is overtaken by a strange sense of déjà vu, rest assured nothing supernatural is going on. All that strangely familiar feeling of having read a novel you know for sure you...

Published in 1901, Buddenbrooks was 26-year-old Thomas Mann’s first novel and the work that set his career on a relentlessly inevitable path toward winning the Nobel Prize twenty-eight years later. The story covers four generations of the titular...

Childhood and Society, written by Psychologist Erik Erikson entails what is considered to be one of the most important studies in child psychology. In this book, Erikson studied the social factors and experiences that shape the child’s...

Daniel Deronda is an English novel written by Mary Ann Evans under the pen name George Eliot and published in 1876. It is the last novel written by George Eliot through which George Eliot continues to analyze the Victorian society in which she...

The publication of Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories catapulted her to the front ranks of major writers of short fiction. What her previous collection Like Life promised, the arrival in 1998 of Birds of America confirmed. Though she...

Margery Kempe is a historic figure who lived in England between 1373 and 1438 and remained in history because of her writings and her religious beliefs. While Kempe was never formally made a saint by the Catholic Church she is named a Christian...

The Big Sea is a novel written by Langston Hughes in 1993 and is an autobiography of the author. The story revolves around the life of the author, Langston Hughes, who grows up in America and faces the same challenges as those brought upon other...

In the 1890s, a family immigrated into America from Poland. Anzia Yezierska recalls the stress and strife of living her with relatives among other Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side in Bread Givers. Published in 1925, the book...