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William Gibson first wrote The Miracle Worker for Playhouse 90, a television anthology drama series that gave networks the opportunity to air something different from the traditional long-running serials, but more meaty than half-our sit-coms or...

The Meursault Investigation is a first novel from Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. It is an example of a postmodern subgenre well-represented by previously published works ranging from Mary Reilly to Wicked to Lady Macbeth. Sometimes called a “...

It's unusual for a novel to reach bestseller status on the New York Times bestseller list by virtue of the sales achieved by word-of-mouth, but that is exactly what happened in the case of Kim Edwards' novel The Memory Keeper's Daughter. Published...

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is considered a short story rather than a novel, but many argue about this, as the work is too big to be a short story, and too small to be called a novel. Thus, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg stands on the...

Written by Aravind Adiga Amnesty: A Novel (published in 2020) tells a story of an illegal immigrant named Danny who is in Sydney, Australia. He has been working as a cleaner and living out of a grocery storeroom for three years and has been trying...

Written by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (published in 2019) tells the story of Jean McConville a mother of ten that gets abducted by a member of the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A) in front of her ten children. The whole city knew it was the...

Inspired by his long-form magazine article of the same name in New York, David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth (released in 2019), is a warning about the forthcoming consequences of global warming on the Earth and the species which inhabit...

Initially entitled The Great Cake, J.R.R. Tolkien's novella Smith of Wootton Major is one of his shorter tales but one that still carries great import for the understanding of his philosophy. Originally intended to be a preface to George...

Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel. Published in 1987 as Morrison was enjoying increasing popularity and success, Beloved became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Its reception by critics was overwhelming, and the...

The Smell of Apples is a semi-autobiographical novel by Mark Behr set in South Africa in the 1970s. The story is narrated by eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus. Marnus is the son of a well-respected military hero who is regarded as a future member of...

The book Black Elk Speaks was based on a series of conversations that the author, John G. Neihardt, had with an Oglala Lakota medicine man named Black Elk, that took place in the presence of Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, as he was acting as...

William Morris was in some ways the nineteenth-century equivalent of Martha Stewart, or Oprah Winfrey. He was a respected and successful poet, who was also an architect, artist, printer, and textile designers. His textiles are still used by...

Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House (first published in 1941 but achieved its fame after a re-issue in 1954) was first released to very little fanfare and received very few reviews (partly due to its availability and partly due to its subject...

Although it might sometimes seem as though children can behave like wild animals, they are not generally portrayed as such in mid-century modern to contemporary literature. In Victorian England, though, as Darwinism gripped the imagination of the...

Written by Philp Nel, Was the Cat in the Hat Black (published in 2017) asks and answers an important question: is children's literature racist? The answer, Nel says, is a resounding "yes." But examples are more subtle than one would think. In The...

America is a country which throughout its history has united geographically many nations, cultures, and generations. The problems of national identity have always been urgent in the USA, and not only in the terms of location. Along with these...

Saved is a play written by the British playwright Edward Bond, which had its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, a well-established London theatre, in 1965. Featuring what is still one of the most shocking scenes in the history of British theatre...

Out of This Furnace is technically an historical novel, but it could also be considered a memoir, or a semi-autobiographical fiction, because American novelist Thomas Bell based the plot and the characters on his own family and their experiences...

The Power is a science fiction novel written in 2016 by British writer Naomi Alderman. It is set in a matriarchal society where women have enhanced powers, one of which is the ability to harness jolts of electricity from the tips of their fingers....

Katherine Anne Porter particularly detested the word "novella", considering it an insult, at best. It was akin to calling a shovel a digging implement; Pale Horse, Pale Rider was generally classified by critics and reviewers as a novella, but...

First published in 2017, Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's second novel Pachinko received very solid reviews. Jean Zimmerman of NPR liked the book, saying that "this is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and...

Written by Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (published in 2012) tells the story of a married couple named Ki Lim and Sang Ly. They live in a city full of trash they make a living by finding recycled things and selling them. If it isn't worse...

Published in 2011 by the American novelist and screenwriter Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is a science fiction and dystopian novel. Drawing heavily from American culture in the 1980s, Ready Player One presents a near-future dystopia where an...

Manuel Puig was an Argentinian novelist and screenwriter, born as Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne in 1932 near Buenos Aires in Argentina. While still in school, Puig developed an interest in psychoanalysis and European cinema, studying English by...