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Gertrude Stein gave her second published collection of poetry the title Tender Buttons in 1914. The poems which make up the collection inside are every bit as offbeat and unexpected as the title. Of course, the literary world has another name for...

Written as a series of mysterious and reflective journal entries, The Seducer's Diary is the first-person narrative of Johannes, a self-identified seducer who takes not so much carnal pleasure as a peculiar delight in the tempting, attracting,...

Reveries of a Bachelor is a novel written by Donald Grant Mitchell that was published in 1850. It was published under Mitchell’s pseudonym Ik Marvel. A reverie is an abstract musing or just a train of thought, and the “reveries” are divided into...

Reflections on the Revolution in France is a pamphlet written by Edmund Burke that was published in 1790. One of the best known intellectual attacks against the politics of and the French Revolution in general, Reflections is a markstone that...

J.D. Salinger wrote the two novellas that are included in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Both were previously published in The New Yorker, with the titles “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An...

The Pyramid is a novel about a man called Oliver and his experience of finding himself and the true meaning of life. The plot is set in a small town Stillbourne, and Oliver's story is divided in three parts. The narrator is Oliver and his...

Somewhere there is a thesaurus with an entry on unappreciated that includes the synonym Herman Melville. One might well forward the proposition that what Vincent Van Gogh was to the world of art, Herman Melville is the world of fiction. At least...

Ovid was an ancient Roman poet living from the 20th of March, 43 BC, to 17 or 18 CE. First published in 16 BC, the Amores was Ovid's first completed book of poetry. Originally, the poems had been published in five books, but Ovid later edited them...

Harriet Wilson was a groundbreaking African-American writer, whose work Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was among the first novels published by African Americans. Wilson was born Harriet E. Adams in 1825 to an Irish mother and...

On the Genealogy of Morals is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher that was born on October 15,1844 and died on August 24,1900. This book was one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s more famous pieces of work...

Published in 1972, My Name is Asher Lev is Chaim Potok’s third novel. Like his best-selling debut The Chosen, the story creates drama from the conflict between Orthodox and secular Judaism. Set predominantly in the Crown Heights section of...

All things considered, it is nothing less than astonishing that most people are not familiar with Eliza Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. Even those who never read a book have at least heard of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Those...

Libra is a 1988 work of speculative fiction by Don DeLillo which tells the story of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The work began as a piece of straightforward non-fiction by DeLillo published five years earlier in Rolling...

The Lady from Shanghai may be the only film noir in made expressly in order to pay back a personal loan. That loan was made to Orson Welles by Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn under terms in which payback would include a movie directed by Welles....

According to the author himself, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was just 16 years old when he witnessed an encounter between an 11-year-old prostitute and her grandmother. Many decades later that prostitute would age by a few years and become the...

Hunger of Memory or Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez is a non-fiction account written by the American author Richard Rodriguez in the year 1982. The book is considered autobiographical one and it follows the writer as he tries...

One fateful night Lydia Maria Child read an article published in a literary magazine by John Palfrey. The Unitarian leader chastised American writers for making no significant contribution to world literature as an exemplar of uniquely American...

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is a comedic fantasy novel spanning thousands of years, written as a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The two authors were living in England at the time and...

In 1900, Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia into the upper class and important Mitchell family. An important part of life in Atlanta, the civil war was a recent history that Mitchell would have heard much about. Gone with the Wind was...

F for Fake holds the somewhat dubious distinction of being the last completed project directed by Orson Welles. In fact, the project was stimulated as a response to a debt the renowned film director owed to the Internet Revenue Service and much of...

The Five Dialogues by Plato (namely, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo) present Plato’s philosophy vis-à-vis his mentor Socrates. These dialogues can be read as a narration of Socrates’ life and are akin to acts in a drama or chapters of...

There are more than three kinds of people in this world, but for the sake simplicity and thematic coherence, let’s break everyone down as belonging to four separate and distinct categories. First you have those people who loved The English Patient...

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical text by David Hume. It was written from 1750 to 1776, after which Hume died before he could publish the work. Originally published in 1779, it has since been republished in 1998 by Hackett...

The Chosen Place, the Timeless People was written by Paule Marshall, a talented novelist and professor of literature. This striking novel was published during 1984 by Vintage.

This text highlights the rocky relationship that develops between two...