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An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories was written by award-winning author Ann Hood. Hood is the bestselling author of The Book That Matters Most, The Knitting Circle, An Italian Wife, Comfort, and several other works. In this extraordinary...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish novel that was translated from its original language into English. It is at one level a gripping, chilling suspense novel about a crime that occurred decades before, and the naive young journalist who...

Fitzgerald’s short stories remain the broadest and most comprehensive summary and analysis of the Jazz Age. He was far more successful in his lifetime with his stories than he was with his longer fiction, and yet both have endured the test of time...

A Study in Scarlet was written in 1886 and published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was rejected three times by publishers; Ward, Lock, and Company finally accepted it in 1886 with the caveat of it delaying...

Stevenson conceived of the idea of Treasure Island (originally titled, "The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys") from a map of an imaginary, romantic island idly drawn by Stevenson and his stepson on a rainy day in Breamar, Scotland. Stevenson had just...

Vanity Fair was published as a series of installments, beginning in 1847. Even before all installments had been published, the work was an enormous hit. Thackeray was hailed for his realistic satire, and yet at the same time criticized for his...

Palahniuk has stated that the book was inspired by an actual fight he had while on a camping trip. He returned to work with bruises, but his co-workers never asked what had happened. This seeming reluctance to know the details of his private life...

David Pelzer, in the second of his three autobiographical books, describes his life as an adolescent who has been taken from his mother in what contemporary court documents call the worst case of child abuse in the history of California in which...

Snow in August is a novel published in 1997 and written by Pete Hamill, who is an American journalist and writer who specializes in novels and essays. Through his extensive travels all around the country and around the world, Hamill is a well...

Carl Degler is an American author born on February 6, 1921 in Newark, New Jersey. At a young age, Degler demonstrated an interest in history and literature. He attended Upsala College and earned a BA in history and later his master’s degree at...

I Am David is a children's novel written originally in Danish, the native tongue of its author Anne Holm. Holm was a journalist before turning her hand to writing a book. She wrote it because she felt that children had the capacity to love a book...

In 1867, Scottish writer penned an essay which was published in the New York Tribune titled “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Although it may not seem obvious to modern sensibilities, the controversial essay was a quite sharpened arrow lodged...

American Pastoral is a novel written by Philip Roth and was published in 1997. It is the twenty-second novel by the author. The story explores the development of American history since the late years of the 1940s to the social commotions of during...

Alias Grace was inspired by a real-life Canadian murder case. Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, were killed on 23 July 1843. Kinnear was shot, Nancy was strangled, and both bodies were dumped in Kinnear's cellar. Nancy was...

The Year of the Hangman is a novel that was written by Gary Blackwood and published in 2002. This novel is a historical fiction work that is geared towards young adults. Blackwood has authored many books for younger readers, and they have all been...

John Cornford’s most anthologized poem is “Full Moon at Tierz” No poet ever wants to have their entire body of work boiled down to just one single expression of their talent, but the inescapable truth is that if you get “Full Moon at Tierra” then...

Although perhaps best known for his essays and satiric prose, renowned Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift was also a prolific poet. Born into a literary family in Dublin, Ireland, in 1666. From an early age, Swift received an intense and demanding...

Alice Munro is a renowned Canadian short story writer who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The fluidity of her works is said to have been a pathbreaking form in the legacy of short story writing, having transformed the way short stories...

E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” is the inspiration for what remains the most performed ballet in the world. That inspiration is second hand, however, for the story told in the Christmastime tradition, The Nutcracker ballet...

The spring and summer of 1742, the interval between Thomas Gray's return from abroad and hs establishment at Peterhouse (Cambridge) witnessed a remarkable spell of creative activity. The sights and sound of the Buckinghamshire countryside inspired...

Educated at Rutgers and Stanford Universities, Robert Pinsky was influenced by a number of ideas and movements, perhaps above all else that of musicality. As a keen player of the saxophone in his youth, Pinsky created poetry that has a detectable...

Who is Robert Herrick and why should anyone want to read his poems? Dramatist, poet, literary critic and owner of one of the all-time great names in the creative arts Algernon Swinburne labeled Herrick as, quite simply, “the greatest songwriter...

Mary Wroth’s cycle of sonnets Pamphilia to Amphilanthus consists of 83 sonnets and 20 songs. Each of the entries in the cycle are written from the point of view of Pamphilia which in its original Latin means something along the lines of full of...

An important figure in the New Formalism poetry movement - which argued for a return to metrical and rhyming verse - Mark Jarman was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1952. As with the output of so many writers, Jarman's oeuvre has been influenced by...