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As a child, White found complete happiness during summers in the Belgrade Lakes in Maine and this love of nature, which lasted his whole life, inspired all three of his children’s books. His first, Stuart Little took White about eighteen years to...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) imagines Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two minor courtiers. In Stoppard's revision, the characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are not fully developed in the original play, fumble...

Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unspecified future. The book is written in the same style as many of Margaret Atwood's novels, that of speculative fiction. Although the book reads as if it is telling a...

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of Scotland’s most famous literary works, characterized by a macabre sensibility, postmodern narrative structure, and a beguiling blend of religious fanaticism, the gothic, political...

Holes is Louis Sachar's fifth novel, and probably his most loved. The novel took Sachar a year and a half to write, and was published in 1998. Holes combined huge popular appeal with critical success, as Holes won or was nominated for almost...

“Master Harold”…and the boys is a multifaceted, stirring testament to the cruelty of apartheid in South Africa. It is Athol Fugard’s most frequently performed and most popular play. Based on events from Fugard’s life, Master Harold is renowned for...

Mockingjay is the third and final installment in The Hunger Games series of novels by Suzanne Collins, completing the story of Katniss Everdeen which began in The Hunger Games (2008) and continued in Catching Fire (2009). By the time Mockingjay...

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) reveals the strange new world of Gilead. Once the United States of America, Gilead was formed by a military coup that shot the President and members of Congress, suspended the...

Released in 1993, Schindler's List is a film that tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saves the lives of over a thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust in World War II. The film is adapted from the book Schindler’s Ark...

Thomas de Quincey reluctantly became a journalist in 1819 in order to alleviate increasingly dire financial difficulties. He initially worked for Blackwood's along with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Blackwood's had a vicious rivalry with a...

The Hunger Games is the first novel in a trilogy that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Together, they are known as the Hunger Games Trilogy. This first novel has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than sixty weeks, and...

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, at the suggestion of her husband - in order to take her mind off of her infant son William's death from scarlet fever in 1845. The plot is based on the real-life murder of a progressive mill...

Published in 1987 as Murakami's fifth novel, Norwegian Wood is based on his short story "Firefly,” which was later included in his short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Contrary to his expectations and wishes, the book turned him...

“Tobermory” was first published in 1909 in The Westminster Gazette. The original version of the story did not include the character Clovis. The story was later revised for book publication and the revised version incorporated Clovis, a character...

Gilead is Marilynne Robinson’s second and most famous work. Published in 2004, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robinson based her novel on real places and real people. Gilead, while fictional,...

That was Then, This is Now was published in 1971. Its title is derived from one of the pivotal lines of the book. It is set in the same world as The Outsiders, which was published 4 years before it in 1967, and even features a brief overlap of...

Published in 1935, Untouchable is Mulk Raj Anand’s first major novel. The novel’s format is very simple—it follows the day in the life of an “untouchable,” a member of India’s lowest social caste. Despite its simplicity, Untouchable is a powerful...

Maugham's story of an unfaithful woman who follows her husband into a cholera epidemic and ultimately earns redemption was inspired by a story in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Purgatorio section of the Comedy contains the lines "Pray, when you...

Childhood’s End is one of Arthur C. Clarke’s most popular and critically acclaimed works, and a mainstay of 20th century science fiction. Published by Ballantine in 1953, it began with the short story “The Guardian Angel," published in Famous...

Go Tell It on the Mountain is Baldwin's first major work as an author and skyrocketed him into literary stardom upon publication in 1952. Semi-autobiographical, the book mirrors the troubled relationship Baldwin had with his own stepfather;...

Published in February 2014, Atlantia is a powerful coming-of-age-story about finding one's voice. Rio is a sixteen-year-old girl living in Atlantia, a city built underwater to preserve human life after the surface of the earth was rendered...

Mark Salzman's book Lying Awake won critical acclaim upon publication in 2000. Salon Magazine marveled that a successful agnostic at home amidst the cultural elite could write a book like Lying Awake, especially after struggling for six...

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy was published in two volumes by Lawrence Sterne in 1768. It is considered a significant work of English literature because it is one of the earliest entries in the genre of travel writing, which...

The Fault in Our Stars is John Green's sixth novel. Green drew inspiration from his time working as a chaplain at a children's hospital and from his friendship with Esther Earl, a friend of Green's to whom the book is dedicated.

The book was...