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Perhaps the single most interesting tidbit relating to the background of Oedipus at Colonus may be apocryphal, but its authenticity or lack thereof does nothing to lessen the symbolic lesson everyone can learn. The son of the playwright Sophocles...

First published in 1995, Loaded is a novel by Christos Tsioklas, an Australian author of Greek heritage. The novel focuses on a 24-hour period in the life of a young gay Greek Australian man living in Melbourne, where Tsioklas himself was born and...

Written by author Dorothy Porter, The Monkeys Mask (published in 1997) tells the story of a 19-year-old girl named Mickey who loves poetry and poets. Then, Mickey mysteriously goes missing under suspicious circumstances and the missing person case...

Written by Frederick James Furnivall, The Babees' Book was originally published in 1908 by London Chatto and Windus. Reproduced copies are also available. This is an instructional book meant to inform its readers of Medieval etiquette....

The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel written by Kazuo Ishiguro and was published by Faber&Faber publishing company in 2015. This is the seventh of Ishiguro’s works and has also been distributed in the USA via Random House publishers.

The novel...

Still Alice is a novel written by Lisa Genova, and was initially self-published in 2007 with iUniverse. The book was then republished by Gallery Books in 2009.

The novel revolves around the life of a middle-aged woman named Alice Howland, who...

The Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner was published in 1993 and features stories composed by the Nobel laureate during what is generally considered the most fruitful period of his literary career: roughly from 1929, when he published The...

The seventeen stories that comprise the collection of Robert Carver in the anthology titled Beginners all reveal the extent to which his writing is profoundly influenced by Ernest Hemingway. From the opener “Why Don’t You Dance?” to the closer “...

Tusk and Stone is a novel written by Malcolm Bosse and published in 1995. Bosse is an author who graduated from Yale University and also served in the Navy. He has written many novels that are set in Asia, capturing much of the cultural and...

The poem To The Pious Memory of the Accomplish'd Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew, published in 1686, is an elegy written by John Dryden in the memory of Anne Killigrew, a British poet who lived between 1660 and 1685.

Even if Anne Killigrew is...

Those who subscribe to such beliefs will confidently assert that one of Nostradamus’ many intricately abstruse quatrains foretells the coming of the Great London Fire of 1666. As far as city-wide conflagrations go, the 1666 blaze that made its way...

The poem "The Hind and the Panther" was written and published in 1687 by Dryden, being an allegory regarding religion. During the time Dryden wrote his poem, he left the Church of England and converted to Catholicism. The poem is the longest poem...

British poet laureate John Dryden lived in a time when religious turmoil and political turmoil were intertwined to the point of confusion. The answer to the question of whether you considered yourself a Catholic or a Protestant had the power to...

In 1681, a grand jury was convened in Middlesex to consider a bill of charges filed against the Earl of Shaftesbury on the grounds of having committed high treason. The Earl of Shaftesbury had already been earlier immortalized through his infamous...

John Dryden was England's first Poet Laureate (1668) and still remains an influential poet in the British literary canon. He has written some of the most valuable work that has emerged from Restoration England to the extent that the period was...

The Tao Te Ching is a classical Chinese text. Though the author and date of composition are still not confirmed, the work was most likely written by Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu, also spelled Laozi, is the father of Taoism. He was a philosopher, a writer, and...

Patricia C. McKissack (1944-2017) is an accomplished children's author. Prolific thanks to the support of her husband, Fredrick, she's written over 100 books for young kids. She served as a board member for the National Children's Book and...

The Go-Between is a novel written by English author, L.P Hartley in 1953. After discovering an old diary, the aging Leo Colston reflects upon the summer he spent as a child at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the home of his wealthy school friend,...

El Buscón is a novel by Francisco de Quevedo that was first published in Spain in 1626 under the title "Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños" which literally translates to "History of the...

This text is essentially a heretic Spanish novella which was released anonymously. It falls under the picaresque genre and was published in 1554. Lazarillo de Tormes has much significance due to its founding of the picaresque which together a...

We Need to Talk About Kevin, a fictional novel written in 2003 written by Lionel Shriver, is about a teen psychopathic killer named Kevin who commits a fictional school massacre. The story is delivered from the perspective of Kevin's mother, Eva,...

The House At Pooh Corner is the second volume of stories about a bear called Winnie-The-Pooh and was written by English author A.A. Milne in 1928. Milne was a gifted and mercurial writer who studied at Cambridge University on a mathematics...

“Slough” was first published in Betjeman’s 1937 collection Continual Dew. Between the World Wars the Berkshire city of Slough (rhymes with cow) in southeastern England became highly industrialized. When the winds of a second war with Germany...

End Zone is the second novel published by Don DeLillo and sets the stage for much of what would come to be viewed as standard conventions of the novel’s work. In other words, very much like Underworld and somewhat less like Libra, End Zone is a...