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Willa Cather first published “Paul’s Case” in a 1905 issue of McCall’s Magazine and almost since the day that edition was delivered to doors across the country, the story has been one of the most anthologized in the history of . The sad, strange...

If you are the type of person who loves when poets experiment a little with the basic essential rules of grammar, then Rainer Maria Rilke is your man. Navigating the world of Rilke’s prodigious verse is a voyage through a land where nouns become...

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a play written by riveting author Rajiv Joseph and was published during 2012 by Dramatists Play Service. This play tells the story of the life-changing impact a Bengal tiger has on two American Marines as well as...

Through a quirk of fate, Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, is considered the first novel written by an African-American, but not the first novel to be published in America by an African-American....

Half a Life is a novel written by V.S. Naipaul in 2001. The novel revolves around the story of Willie Somerset Chandran, whose father is a Brahmin from the Hindu caste system and his mother a Dalit. Willie's middle name 'Somerset' comes from the...

The Analects of Confucius, Lun Yu, or simply, The Analects, were written about 500 BC and are traditionally attributed to Confucius. However, much of the actual text was written by his students over a time period spanning the thirty to fifty years...

The Satanic Verses is a magical realist epic with three major plotlines. The first of these plotlines follows two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, after they miraculously survive a plane crash over the English Channel. The...

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel. It was published in two installments in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger but was not completed due to Poe’s firing from the magazine. The full novel was...

Though D. H. Lawrence's third published novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) is largely autobiographical. The novel, which began as "Paul Morel," was sparked by the death of Lawrence's mother, Lydia. Lawrence reexamined his childhood, his relationship...

The Light in the Forest is a fictional novel written by the American author Conrad Richter and published in the year 1953. The novel is considered as being a coming of age novel because it follows the development of the main character, True Son.

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The Pilgrim’s Progress is John Bunyan’s most enduring legacy. The book, which went through eleven editions in the author’s lifetime, has never subsequently been out of print. Though it now appears as two parts in one volume, the parts were...

In the Skin of a Lion covers the years 1913 – 1938, and is set in the city of Toronto and surrounding rural areas. It is a time of industrialization and growth for Toronto, a change that could not be accomplished without the labor of immigrants.

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Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, stands as one of the great slave narratives, in the company of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow, is without a doubt one of the most beloved children's books of all time. Its 1939 film adaptation is equally renowned; it routinely appears on lists of the...

Published in 1955 and initially dismissed by critics and audiences, Pedro Páramo has since established itself as the precursor to a new phase of Latin American writing, as well as a superlative example of modernism in contemporary literature.

The...

Some may question why the greatest director of Westerns in Hollywood history was not the man that made the greatest Western in Hollywood history. The answer is surprisingly simple: John Ford’s most memorable films reveal how the settling of the...

A poet whose work was political to its core, Mahmoud Darwish was a prolific and at times controversial Palestinian poet. Over the course of his career, Darwish published over 30 poetry collections and eight prose collections (novels, essays etc)....

The Maze Runner is the first book in a dystopian science-fiction trilogy aimed at the young adult reader. The story follows Thomas, a teenage boy, who awakens in an elevator with no memory of the past except his own name. When the doors open he...

Tartuffe, first performed as a three-act play before King Louis XIV in 1664, and then in its official five-act version in 1669, is perhaps Moliere’s greatest accomplishment. Its piercing commentary on hypocrisy and impiety, its light-hearted wit...

The Robbers is a play published in 1781 by the German playwright Friedrich Schiller. It is considered as being a very important play because it embodies the principles of the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany. The play became popular very fast...

By the time Sarah Orne Jewett published The Country of the Pointed Firs in two parts in The Atlantic in 1896, she was already a respected and well-known author. She had been receiving reviews from major figures such as William Dean Howells for...

"The Gambler" is the world-famous novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1866.

In 1863, Fyodor Dostoyevsky came to rest in Wiesbaden. There in a few days he lost all his money gambling. To get out of debt, he signed a...

Little Brother is a science-fiction novel that was published by Tor Books on April 29, 2008; it was written by the author Cory Doctorow. The story follows a group of teens during and after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, California. It...

Randy Pausch had a good life. He was the happily married father of 3 young children and had a highly successful career as a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He was universally beloved and, according to those who knew him well,...