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What sets Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code apart from other novels is not the number of websites and social media pages devoted to it; many novels benefit from such dissemination of information about it. No, what sets Brown’s novel apart from...

Camus was influenced by a diverse collection of foreign authors and philosophies in the 1930s. The mood of nihilism was high. Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky had remained significant in thought since the turn of the century. German phenomenology was...

Zlata's Diary is a book written by Zlata Filipovic. It is a first-person account in journal form penned by Zlata as an eleven and twelve-year-old eyewitness to the war between the Croats, the Serbs and the Muslims in her home-town of Sarajevo. The...

Your Inner Fish was written Neil Shubin and published in 2008. The book was named the best book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences. Shubin has authored two books, Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within. Shubin is a researcher and a...

World War Z is a 2006 parody of the oral history genre of historical non-fiction which purports to relate the story of mankind’s ultimate showdown with the zombie apocalypse in the words of various survivors. The concept of mixing satire within...

The Tipping Point is social critic Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful examination into the increasingly important concept of what has come to be known since the book’s publication in 2000 as “going viral.” Gladwell’s own definition of the tipping point...

The Killer Angels was written by Michael Shaara and was first published in 1974. Though The Killer Angels was not immediately popular during Shaara’s lifetime, the novel won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Despite this award, the novel was...

Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation to reveal the dark truth about the food that Americans consume on a daily basis. In this two-part journey we discover the history behind fast food, the big names who helped create this fast food culture, how...

Stargirl is a young adult novel written by Jerry Spinelli that narrows in on the personalities and issues of students in high schools. The book earned the Parents Choice Gold Award; a New York Times Bestseller, an ALA Top Ten Best Books Award...

Silent Spring was written by Rachel Carson, an author and a marine biologist who worked for the US Fish and WIldlife Service. The environmental science work was published in 1962, spurring the environmental conservation movement and helped the...

Paul Zindel was an American writer born on May 15, 1936 in Staten Island, New York. As a teenager, he was an avid writer and clearly had a passion for the arts. However, after graduating high school, he attended Wagner College to study chemistry....

Published in 1951, The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. These otherwise-unrelated stories are tied together with an overarching narrative: the story of the living tattoos on the "illustrated...

Hoot is written by Carl Hiaasen and was published in 2002. This is a story that takes place in Coconut Grove, Florida, and is mostly about Roy Eberhardt, who has just moved to Florida after moving to many different places and is the new kid.

Roy...

"Ever" is the author's debut novella which could be variously interpreted and uses imaginative language along with an interesting syntactic structure. What's interesting are the bracketed paragraphs along with the poetic repetition and strong...

Bleachers, written by John Grisham, was first published during 2003 and was later published during 2004 by Arrow. This fictional story highlights the love and loss that protagonist Neely Crenshaw experiences as he takes a trip down memory lane.

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"The Fall of the House of Usher" was one of Edgar Allan Poe's first contributions to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, of which he was an associate editor. The story was printed in 1839, a little over a year after "Ligeia," which Poe always...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is the third novel in the Millennium Trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest starts right after the events of The Girl Who Played with Fire. Lisbeth Salander lies in a Swedish...

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second novel in the Millennium Trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire starts a year after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Lisbeth Salander returns to Sweden, she calls her...

Under The Dome is a science fiction novel by Stephen King. The story is set in and around a small town in Maine and is an intricate, complex story with multiple characters that tell how the town's inhabitants deal with being cut off from the...

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a Stephen King novel published in 1999. King novels can—generally speaking—be divided into two elemental types. Some feature large ensemble casts of characters that eschew any obviously singular perspective or...

This historical novel, heavily based on true experience, tells the life of a Jewish man facing extreme prejudice. Giorgio Bassani reveals his take on the world, on life, through the eyes of his twenty-seven year old self in this 1962 novel....

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was originally published by Haruki Murakami in three sections in the mid-'90s and was translated into English by Jay Rubin in '97. The three books were titled, The Book of the Thieving Magpie, The Book of the Prophesying...

John F. Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States and served that role until his assassination in November 1963. However, few know of his political background prior to his time in office. Before becoming president, Kennedy...

The Vicar of Wakefield, published between 1761 and 1762, is Oliver Goldsmith's most famous work and one of the most beloved and widely-read 18th century English novels. It is also considered a model example of the sentimental novel, one of the...