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The Life of Omar Ibn Said is an autobiography written by Senegalese scholar, Omar ibn Said, who documented his life living under slavery in this book. The book was written in 1831 and written in Arabic. It was sold to the Library of Congress in...

It is perhaps not straying too terribly far from the certainty known as absolute truth that without the release of the so-called “Kinsey Report” in 1948 and the subsequent release of two highly regarded semi-autobiographical novels dealing openly...

Michael Cunningham is an American author born on November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He showed great potential to be a writer as a teenager, leading to him studying English literature at Stanford University and later the University of Iowa for...

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Böll. It was first published in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany). The...

Herman Hesse published his novel Steppenwolf in 1927, but its mixture of psychological and philosophy about a rebellious non-conformist dropping out of a society he cannot abide would not find a truly appreciative audience for more than three...

The Nietzsche Reader, by Friedrich Nietzsche himself, is a collection of many of his analyses and stories. Nietzsche was influenced by many famous scientists and artists, such as Goethe, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. His was born in 1844, but...

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy to acknowledge and celebrate the yin and yang of life. This book was originally published during 1871 and was later published during 2003 by Penguin Classics. Specifically, Nietzsche was aiming to...

Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher and Christian theologian whose contributions were critical in the development of existential philosophy. In fact, he is regarded by some as the first true existential philosopher. He wrote Philosophical...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel composed an original work, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in 1820. This book holds Hegel’s “legal, moral, social and political philosophy” within its pages. He goes into a deeper expansion of the topics he...

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Lifeis an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche published as part of his Untimely Meditation in 1874. The essay is a definitively modernist argument against a politically motivated retelling of the events of...

The Gay Science was originally published in 1882 with a second edition published five years later expanded to include an additional “fifth book” as well as an appendix of songs. Although the title is perhaps not quite as familiar to those...

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. It was published in 1993 and received the Booker Proze later that year.

Tge story is about a ten-year-old boy living in Barrytown, North Dublin, in 1968, and tells of the events that...

Acquainted With the Night is a non-fiction novel written by Christopher Dewdney in 2004. The book revolves around the 'night' and its various aspects of it. The book has 14 chapters and each chapter refers to a certain hour of the night and...

In 1994, Lois Lowry was awarded one of the highest annual honors given out for juvenile literature when her novel The Giver won the Newberry Award. That book remains her signature work, but in the decades since she has revisited the dystopia she...

Gathering Blue is a book written by Lois Lowry and published in 2000. The book is mainly centered around the character called Kira who has a disability by way of a deformed leg. She is an orphan as both her parents are dead so she now has to adapt...

L'œuvre is a French novel by Emile Zola, loosely translated as His Masterpiece or The Masterpiece. The Masterpiece was published as a serial in 1885 and as a novel by Charpentier in 1886. The title is a reference to the problems the protagonist...

Born in 1908, by the time Theodore Roethke died in 1963 he had established himself as one of the most important poets of his generation and with “My Papa’s Waltz” also became one of the most widely read. To find a college student who has not been...

Desert Solitaire is an autobiographical nature journal by Edward Abbey, published in 1968. It is Abbey's fourth published book and first full length non-fiction work.

Frequently compared to Thoreau's Walden, Desert Solitaire is regarded highly as...

The Deerslayer is the last entry in what has become known as the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This final look back at the story at the title character actually named Natty Bumppo (but more often referred to as Hawkeye) and his...

Jonathan Coe is a contemporary British novelist, known for his fictional works which balance satire and politics in equal measure. He was born to a working class family in a suburb of Birmingham in 1961. He studied at Cambridge University, and...

The Day of the Triffids became the first novel that author John Wyndham published under his own name and started readers immediately upon its appearance in 1951 with its memorable opening sequence. A man wakes up in a hospital amidst a strange...

Like many people, Betty Friedan decided to attend a college reunion fifteen years after graduating. The institution of higher learning was a prestigious women’s college, Smith. Unlike most people who attend a college reunion, Friedan came equipped...

Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong, an eminent novelist and poet who also frequently engaged in satire. She held many controversial views towards sexuality and feminism which became entrenched in her most famous novel, Fear of Flying. ...

Published in December 1916, Under Fire (French title: Le Feu) is a war novel based on Henri Barbusse's own experiences fighting on the Western Front of World War I. It was one of the first novels about World War I, and was written while Barbusse...