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William S. Burroughs is an American author born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, he led a very privileged lifestyle considering his family was wealthy and emphasized the importance of education. Thus, Burroughs was an avid...

Restoration is a novel that was written by Rose Tremain and published in 1989. It was pretty popular, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 and being the Sunday Express Book of the Year. In addition, Restoration was made into a film in...

One of the few guarantees you will ever find in life is that Ken Kesey will forever be best known for writing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With that in mind, many people may be surprised or even shocked to learn Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes...

Witness is an autobiographical novel written by the American Jay Vivian Chambers. The novel was published in 1952, nine years before the author’s death. The novel was a best-seller for more than a year and it focuses on the life of the author.

The...

Women and Other Animals is a collection of short stories written by the American author Bonnie Jo Campbell and published in the year 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The author was awarded the Associated Writing Programs Award for...

To fully appreciate the context and background of Glengarry Glen Ross it helps to know who Thorstein Veblen was, to be familiar with postmodern literary techniques and—perhaps most importantly—not assume that just because you saw the movie you...

Published in 1958, The Question (French title: La Question) was a largely autobiographical work that described methods of torture used by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. The text recounts the author's arrest by French...

The Life of Omar Ibn Said is an autobiography written by Senegalese scholar, Omar ibn Said, who documented his life living under slavery in this book. The book was written in 1831 and written in Arabic. It was sold to the Library of Congress in...

It is perhaps not straying too terribly far from the certainty known as absolute truth that without the release of the so-called “Kinsey Report” in 1948 and the subsequent release of two highly regarded semi-autobiographical novels dealing openly...

Michael Cunningham is an American author born on November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He showed great potential to be a writer as a teenager, leading to him studying English literature at Stanford University and later the University of Iowa for...

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Böll. It was first published in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany). The...

Herman Hesse published his novel Steppenwolf in 1927, but its mixture of psychological and philosophy about a rebellious non-conformist dropping out of a society he cannot abide would not find a truly appreciative audience for more than three...

The Nietzsche Reader, by Friedrich Nietzsche himself, is a collection of many of his analyses and stories. Nietzsche was influenced by many famous scientists and artists, such as Goethe, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. His was born in 1844, but...

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy to acknowledge and celebrate the yin and yang of life. This book was originally published during 1871 and was later published during 2003 by Penguin Classics. Specifically, Nietzsche was aiming to...

Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher and Christian theologian whose contributions were critical in the development of existential philosophy. In fact, he is regarded by some as the first true existential philosopher. He wrote Philosophical...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel composed an original work, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in 1820. This book holds Hegel’s “legal, moral, social and political philosophy” within its pages. He goes into a deeper expansion of the topics he...

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Lifeis an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche published as part of his Untimely Meditation in 1874. The essay is a definitively modernist argument against a politically motivated retelling of the events of...

The Gay Science was originally published in 1882 with a second edition published five years later expanded to include an additional “fifth book” as well as an appendix of songs. Although the title is perhaps not quite as familiar to those...

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. It was published in 1993 and received the Booker Proze later that year.

Tge story is about a ten-year-old boy living in Barrytown, North Dublin, in 1968, and tells of the events that...

Acquainted With the Night is a non-fiction novel written by Christopher Dewdney in 2004. The book revolves around the 'night' and its various aspects of it. The book has 14 chapters and each chapter refers to a certain hour of the night and...

In 1994, Lois Lowry was awarded one of the highest annual honors given out for juvenile literature when her novel The Giver won the Newberry Award. That book remains her signature work, but in the decades since she has revisited the dystopia she...

Gathering Blue is a book written by Lois Lowry and published in 2000. The book is mainly centered around the character called Kira who has a disability by way of a deformed leg. She is an orphan as both her parents are dead so she now has to adapt...

L'œuvre is a French novel by Emile Zola, loosely translated as His Masterpiece or The Masterpiece. The Masterpiece was published as a serial in 1885 and as a novel by Charpentier in 1886. The title is a reference to the problems the protagonist...

Born in 1908, by the time Theodore Roethke died in 1963 he had established himself as one of the most important poets of his generation and with “My Papa’s Waltz” also became one of the most widely read. To find a college student who has not been...