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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...

This selection of bleak stories features some of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s most acclaimed short works. Although they were not published together during his lifetime, they hold together as a collection of his earlier and most corrosively modernist...

With its depictions of demonic rites and illicit sexuality, The Monk ignited a firestorm of controversy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an impassioned but very mixed review of the novel; though he thought that some elements (such the...

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague was written by author and journalist Geraldine Brooks. It was published in 2011 and was chosen as both a New York Times and a Washington Post Notable Book. This novel is based on the true story of the village...

The Trials of Brother Jero was first published in 1964. Its original performance was organized by Farris-Belgrave Productions and held at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City in 1967. Today it is known as one of Soyinka’s most popular...

Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is one of the playwright’s most intriguing early works, and is exemplary of his desire to unite the modern and the ancient Greek. Written and first performed in 1924, it is influenced by the stories of...

The Moonstone was written in 1868, published in the middle of Wilkie Collins’s career as a writer. It was written after his first major success in The Woman in White (1860), yet, alongside with the 1860 sensation novel, The Moonstone is Collins’s...

Penpal is the first novel by Dathan Auerbach. Auerbach did not originally set out to write a book; he began by posting macabre short stories on a subreddit called "nosleep". The first of these was "Footsteps" and he received such a positive...

Published in 2000, House of Leaves is the first novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. The book was aa huge success upon release, being translated into multiple other languages. One strange thing that makes the book stand out is its structure, a great...

Scottish writer Iain Banks is one of the most famous in the world among contemporary novelists. Critics regard him highly, and rightly so, in early 1999, according to a survey on the website of BBC News Banks got to the fifth place in the top ten...

“The Illiterate” is a sonnet by William Meredith first published in The Open Sea and Other Poems in 1958. Meredith was a homosexual writing in the Eisenhower era of coerced and enforced conformity. Thus the illiteracy of the poem’s situated...

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia has been hailed not only as the playwright’s best work but also one of the best works of drama of the 20th century. This comedic, ambitious, moving, and cerebral work spans both time (but not space) and multiple...

Published in 1862, Les Misérables is considered a classic of world literature. A sprawling epics that focuses on the social outcasts of early 19th century France, it is both an homage to the French culture and a compendium of timeless observations...

The French Lieutenant's Woman was John Fowles' third published novel, and it has achieved enduring commercial and critical success.

The novel attracted the attention of critics soon after it was published, and was better received in literary...

The novel The Whisper was written by the British author named Emma Clayton and published in 2012. Emma Clayton is well-known author that wrote numerous children’s books, science fiction books that have as their main characters young men and women...

The Roar is a children's science fiction novel published by author Emma Clayton in 2009, and illustrated by Jim Murray. It was published in Britain in the same year as The Hunger Games was published in the USA, and worthwhile comparisons can be...

Often compared to John Steibeck's rural American masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, Under the Feet of Jesus tells the story of a young migrant worker and her family. Set in the Western United States and spanning a single summer harvest, the novel...

Ransom Riggs is an American novelist born on February 3, 1979 in Maryland. After graduating from Pine View School for the Gifted, he attended Kenyon College to study English literature and later enrolled at the University of Southern California to...