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Giovanni Boccaccio would be a more than appropriate figure to assume the honorary status of Patron Saint of the First Amendment. If, that is, he had not lived well before America, the Constitution or the very idea of freedom of speech ever...

The novel Fathers and Sons is a social novel published in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The novel focuses on the conflict between the ’fathers’, the old aristocrat society having a traditional way of thinking, and the ’sons’, the new...

Joel Chandler Harris was already an experienced Atlanta newspaper editor with a growing reputation when he was tapped for a temporary position filling in for the paper’s writer of highly popular dialect stories. Recalling stories he’d heard...

In Daniel S. Burt’s book the ranks that 100 greatest novels of all time, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier comes in at number 62, sandwiched between The Age of Innocence and The Awakening. Reverse the placement of those two novels the this...

Richard Wilbur was a poet whose works were elegant yet witty and paradoxical. He was the second poet laureate of the United States, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Things of This World: Poems in 1957, and then won another Pulitzer...

Mountains Beyond Mountains, written by Tracy Kidder, was published in 2003. It is a non-fiction and biographical book which follows the life of Paul Farmer, an anthropologist, who is trying to fight tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. The...

Milkweed, written by Jerry Spinelli, is a young adult fiction novel published in 2003. It takes place in Warsaw, Poland, and the main character is mainly called Misha Pilsudski. Spinelli describes this Misha's life during the Holocaust, where he...

Funny In Farsi is a humorous autobiography written by Firoozeh Dumas. It chronicles the experiences of Firoozeh and her family when they moved to Southern California form Iran in 1972, when Firoozeh was seven years old. When they arrived only...

Tom Wolfe is a dandy. Fashion-wise, Wolfe belongs to era of men’s style and concern with their appearance that is as out of joint with the Space Age as the street urchins of Dicken or the ladies with sense and sensibility desperately seeking a...

Strength in What Remains was written by Tracy Kidder, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was published in 2009. The book is a nonfiction book, a biography of a man from Burundi named Deogratias, aka Deo. Deo is a Tutsi who survived the Hutu-Tutsi...

Tobias Wolff is an American author born on June 19, 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. After graduating high school, he attended Hertford College to study English and later enrolled at Stanford University to obtain his M.A. Afterward, Wolff ventured...

Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) wrote Till We Have Faces in 1956. This was his last novel and was cowritten by his wife, Joy Davidman. It is the retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. Lewis developed the idea for this novel...

Robert Zimmerman - whose nom de plume is Robert Alexander - is an American author whose works so far have concentrated on fictionalizing significant moments in the history of Russia. Born and raised in Chicago, Zimmerman has travelled to and...

Published in 2005 by a prominent American historian, David McCoullogh’s 1776 discusses the events of the American Revolution and is considered a companion of his Pulitzer-winning biography of John Adams, which was adapted by HBO into a miniseries....

“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” is an example of a form of storytelling alternatively known as a “paired story” or a “diptych” in which two separate and distinct works are connected thematically in some manner. As a literary...

The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 and became an instant classic, not just within the science fiction genre but in the wider, mainstream literary world. It was not written as a novel, but was a conglomeration of several short stories...

Charles Baudelaire is considered one of the most stimulating poets of the nineteenth century. He was born during 1821 in France and died during 1867. Although he was a poet, he was also a novelist and prose writer. According to the Poetry...

A Bildungsroman (coming of age) story about a black boy growing up in America, The White Boy Shuffle is the debut novel of American author and poet Paul Beatty. Published in 1996, the book is acclaimed for its insight into African-American culture...

Jasper Fforde was born in London, England and spent almost twenty years working in the film industry. He worked on movies which included Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. His desire to become a novelist and create his own works, drove...

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise are a series of letters written in Latin in the twelfth century and published in Paris in 1616. From then, the letters sped all over Europe and were translated anonymously into various languages. The letters tell...

Cousin Bette is a narrative of a famous French realist-writer Honore de Balzac written in 1846. The main theme of the book is the display of disastrous consequences of dependent and humiliating position of a poor relative for a person’s character....

The National Book Award for Fiction winner in 1990 was Middle Passage by Charles Johnson. The title is a reference to the long and often terrifying transport of African slaves across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. The...

Push by Sapphire tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones, a 16-year-old overweight, impoverished girl living in the slums of Harlem. At the start of the novel, Claireece is pregnant with her second child, a result of the sexual abuse she...

All the Names, originally titled Todos os Nomes, is a novel written by the author Jose Saramago. It was published in 1997 by Caminho Publishing in Portugal, originally in the Portuguese language.

The book is centered around Senhor Jose, a man...