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Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...

Nella Larsen; Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories was published in 2001. Nella Larsen wrote a couple short stories, and Quicksand and Passing, two books. However, as she could not find a publisher for her third book, she stopped writing and began...

Due to his chronological placement at the end of the line in the extensive use of the heroic couplet behind John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe is often referred to as the last of the Augustan poets. His specialty was...

Comfort Woman is Nora Okja Keller's debut into full-length literature. Following her award winning short story "Mother-Tongue," Comfort Woman stays true to Keller's mission to speak the unspeakable concerning the plight of Japanese women...

Translated into English, the title of this epic Germanic poem means “Song of the Nibelungs.” A fact that is utterly meaningless, of course, unless you know that the Nibelungs were an ancient dynasty whose conquering by the hero is the subject of...

The Secret Scripture is a novel published recently in 2008 and written by Sebastian Barry. For this novel, Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, one of the two times that he has received the honor. In addition, The Secret...

The poems of Gwendolyn Brooks can effectively be separated into two distinct and starkly divided epochs. The line which bifurcates these two radically different periods in the life and work of Brooks slices through the year 1967 with the point of...

C. S. Lewis was already a well-known literary critic and religious writer by the time he embarked on what has become his best-loved project: The Chronicles of Narnia. The first in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in...

Published in 2009, The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In this speculative fiction trilogy, Atwood vividly describes a possible future created by ruthless corporations, disregard for the environment,...

Zeitoun is a nonfiction account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun's heroism and subsequent arrest in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, LA in 2005. Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant and American citizen, chooses to ride out the storm...

First released in 1936 and banned from the U.S. for nearly thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn, along with its predecessor Tropic of Cancer, set a new standard for explicitness of content. D. H. Lawrence’s novels, T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and other...

George Gordon, Lord Byron, began writing poetry in his youth. He published his first book of verse, Fugitive Pieces, at age 18, and he continued to write and publish poetry until his untimely death at 36. Although a lifelong poet, Byron did not...

By the time Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, author Kazuo Ishiguro was already one of the most renowned and critically acclaimed British writers. He had previously received the Whitbread and the Booker Prize for earlier works, and his The...

Published in 1989, Maestro is the first novel by Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy. A bildungsroman, it focuses on a teenage boy named Paul Crabbe and his relationship with his piano teacher, Herr Eduard Keller. The book draws on many...

In the preface to his new edition, Joseph Heller recalls when he originally submitted Catch-22 to various magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He describes how the novel was dismissed, not even making the New York Times bestseller...

The Woman in the Dunes is a novel crafted by Japanese writer and playwright Koko Abe and published in 1962. It is the story of a teacher interested in insects who went in search of a rare instance of the Spanish fly. Stumbling on a remote village,...

Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when...

John McCrae was a Canadian poet, artist and author. He was also a soldier in World War I, which greatly influenced his poetry. His poems are drawn from his first hand experiences on the front line and his times treating the wounded soldiers.

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The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...

A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).

This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of stories, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway/PEN Award in 2000, and several of the stories appeared in The New Yorker. The title is taken from one of the stories in the...

Julia Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, in 1991 at the age of 41. Built from interrelated stories she had been publishing in magazines and literary reviews throughout the 1980s, it was the first major...

Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...