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All but My Life is an inspirational and powerful story of Gerda Weissman Klein's life during World War II and the Holocaust. In her hometown of Bielitz, Poland, the Nazis invaded, and the situation quickly became increasingly hostile and...

Frequently considered as the first novel of the Young Adult genre, Across Five Aprils is a historical novel by written Irene Hunt and set in the civil war. It was published in 1964 by Berkley and won the 1965 Newbery Honor. Across Five Aprils...

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to roughly 2000 BCE. It is believed to be one of the earliest works of literature in human history. Scholars believe that its origins were in ancient Sumerian poems that...

Federico García Lorca maintained a lifelong interest in the music and culture of rural Spain, a fascination that heavily influenced one of his most acclaimed tragedies, Blood Wedding. More directly, the play was inspired by a sensational crime...

H. Rider Haggard came to literary prominence with the publication of King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. Haggard self-consciously modeled the book on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which Haggard had read. He bet his brother that he could...

Desperate Characters is a novel written by Paula Fox in 1970 and published by W.W. Norton & Company. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Sophie and Otto Brentwood. They are a middle-class and middle-aged couple who are wealthy and of...

Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. The novel is told in as a collection of short stories revolving around a circle of friends, who some of them are heroin users. The seven sections of the...

The Famished Road is a fantasy Booker-Prize winning novel written by Ben Okri and was published in the United Kingdom on 14 March 1991 by Jonathan Cape publishers.

The novel follows the life of Azaro, a spirit child, travelling in Nigeria. Azaro...

Jeanette Winterson is an English author born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England. She grew up in a very religious household, but her sexual identity as a lesbian often conflicted with the values of her Church. At age 16, she decided to leave...

I, Robot is not exactly a novel in the traditional sense. And yet, it is something more than a mere collection of loosely connected short stories as well. In addition to the recurrence of certain characters, the unifying aspect that maintains the...

"The Magic Mountain" is a philosophical novel of the German writer Thomas Mann, published by Fischer in 1924.

"The Magic Mountain" for its many motifs has a lot in common with the earlier story of Mann's "Tristan" (1903), in which the protagonist...

James Agee was an American author and a very influential film critic. He is known for an autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), for which he was posthumously awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize. He had begun writing A Death in the...

"Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." is a powerful and poignant memoir by Luis J. Rodriguez, a Chicano writer, and activist from Los Angeles. The book chronicles Rodriguez's upbringing in the city's gang-ridden neighborhoods and his...

The Lives of Animals is a unique work in the canon of South African author J.M. Coetzee. Published in 1999, the work is an amalgamation of non-fiction and fiction that come together for the purpose of stimulating discussion about the underlying...

"Anansi Boys" is a book penned by the talented British writer Neil Gaiman. It made its debut in 2005. Stands alone as a captivating tale that unfolds within the universe as Gaimans earlier work "American Gods." This novel masterfully combines...

Dispatchesis a New Journalism book by Michael Herr published in 1977. The autobiographical work details Herr's harrowing experiences as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War.

Prior to the book's release, many Americans had a very narrow...

Captain Correlli's Mandolin was written by Louis de Bernieres, a British novelist who lets his wild imagination shine through his writing. This fiction novel was originally published during 1994 and was later published during 1995 by Vintage....

In her illustrious career which was peppered with numerous literary awards for her poetry, May Swenson wrote over fifty poems ranging from clipped and nonchalant ‘Analysis of Baseball’, which quite literally analyses every element of the game, to...

The Last Samurai, published in September 2000, was written by Helen DeWitt, an author who graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Classics. The novel effortlessly combines different languages and cultures to tell the story of a...

Civilization and Its Discontents, which Freud wrote in the summer of 1929, compares "civilized" and "savage" human lives in order to reflect upon the meaning of civilization in general. Like many of his later works, the essay generalizes the...

William Stafford was one of the most prolific poets in American history, having published more than sixty different volumes of verse over the course of his life which stretched across most of the 20th century. Stafford is the very definition of...

Born in 1942, Sharon Olds garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984 and the nation’s highest literary honor, the Pulitzer Prize, in 2013. Her poetry is defiantly earthy on the subject of sexuality and uncompromisingly honest on the...

Mere Christianity is a theological book written by C.S. Lewis and published in 1952. The book talks about Christianity, explaining the religion and dispelling any controversies. C.S. Lewis narrates the book and spends most of the story defending...