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Daphnis and Chloe is one of the few surviving examples of one of the most unusual genres of ancient literature: the Greek romance. The author is known only as Longus and is believed to have lived on the isle of Lesbos between the 2nd and 3rd...

Clay’s Ark is the last of five novels which comprise Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster series of science fiction tales. The series that commence in 1976 was brought to a close with a book which gestated and was born during a very difficult period for...

Big Sur was written by Jack Kerouac in 1962. The book was published five years after his novel On the Road put him and the Beat Generation in the national spotlight.

The “Beat” in Beat Generation was defined by Kerouac himself as having several...

The publication of Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories catapulted her to the front ranks of major writers of short fiction. What her previous collection Like Life promised, the arrival in 1998 of Birds of America confirmed. Though she...

The Metaphysic or Metaphysics is a canonical collection of various writings by Aristotle which were collected and featured in the order they now appear, although there are historical-critical debates about whether this was the originally intended...

Here’s a timed quiz for you: name a memorable African-American female character living in the post-Civil War era from American Literature published before the Civil Rights Movement that wasn’t either a mammy, a prostitute or an ill-fated jazz...

"Abeng" by Michelle Cliff is a novel that explores the complexities of identity, race, and history through the story of a young woman named Clare Savage. The novel is set in Jamaica in the mid-20th century and follows Clare as she struggles to...

Anagrams is the first novel by acclaimed short story writer Lorrie Moore. Published in 1986, the novel is attempt to transfer the concept of anagrammatic rearrangement from letters to characters. Moore has described the work as a “cubist novel”...

Ariel is the second full-length collection of poetry written by Sylvia Plath, published in 1965. The poems in Ariel were largely written in the weeks preceding Plath's infamous death by suicide in 1963 and explore the themes of despair, rebirth,...

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a collection of short stories written by Robert Olen Butler documenting the lives of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States of America. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.

The stories...

Anticlaudianus was written by French theologian and poet Alain de Lille. This lengthy, symbolic poem is about creation as well as the edification of the human soul by God, nature, theology, and philosophy. Alain is also well-known for another poem...

Amerika is the first novel written by Franz Kafka, but remained incomplete until Kafka's death and was only published posthumously. The German book was released three years after Kafka's death in 1927 although the first English translation was not...

The novel 2001: A Space Odyssey was written by Arthur C. Clarke in the year 1968. The novel is the result of the collective effort of both Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick but only Clarke appears as the author of the book.

The novel is based...

With the publication of her very first volume of verse simply titled Poems, Anna Letitia Barbauld became an overnight literary sensation whose influence would go on to strongly manifest itself through the poetry of the Romantic Period. Sadly, many...