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George Gordon, Lord Byron, began writing poetry in his youth. He published his first book of verse, Fugitive Pieces, at age 18, and he continued to write and publish poetry until his untimely death at 36. Although a lifelong poet, Byron did not...

By the time Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, author Kazuo Ishiguro was already one of the most renowned and critically acclaimed British writers. He had previously received the Whitbread and the Booker Prize for earlier works, and his The...

Published in 1989, Maestro is the first novel by Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy. A bildungsroman, it focuses on a teenage boy named Paul Crabbe and his relationship with his piano teacher, Herr Eduard Keller. The book draws on many...

In the preface to his new edition, Joseph Heller recalls when he originally submitted Catch-22 to various magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He describes how the novel was dismissed, not even making the New York Times bestseller...

The Woman in the Dunes is a novel crafted by Japanese writer and playwright Koko Abe and published in 1962. It is the story of a teacher interested in insects who went in search of a rare instance of the Spanish fly. Stumbling on a remote village,...

Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when...

John McCrae was a Canadian poet, artist and author. He was also a soldier in World War I, which greatly influenced his poetry. His poems are drawn from his first hand experiences on the front line and his times treating the wounded soldiers.

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The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...

A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).

This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of stories, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway/PEN Award in 2000, and several of the stories appeared in The New Yorker. The title is taken from one of the stories in the...

Julia Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, in 1991 at the age of 41. Built from interrelated stories she had been publishing in magazines and literary reviews throughout the 1980s, it was the first major...

Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...

A Long Way from Chicago was written by Richard Peck, a writer, playwright, and speaker, in 1998 and won a Newbury Honor in 1999. Its sequel, A Year Down Yonder, was published in 2000 and won the Newbery Medal in 2001.

The book tells the story of...

The House of the Spirits (La Casa de los Espíritus) marked Isabel Allende's novelistic debut and the advent of her status as an internationally best-selling author. After spending many years as a journalist, television, and theater writer in Chile...

Written in 1897 and published in 1903, Such Is Life is a novel written by Joseph Furphy. The book is the fictional diary of the protagonist and narrator Tom Collins. Taking place in Australia, the diary recounts the lives of the people who live in...

For the Term of His Natural Life is a book written by English-born Australian author Marcus Clarke. It was written in the middle 1870s and is part novel, part history book and gives a vivid and realistic account of the brutality of the colonial...

First published in 1966 by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian author, A Jest of God tells of a 34-year-old schoolteacher named Rachel Cameron who lives with her mother.

Rachel feels trapped in the deceit and pettiness of her small town that includes...

Anyone who has seen the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon has already also read it…to a point. The most famous and beloved film version of the story of Sam Spade on the trail of the black bird is actually one of...

Dennis Scott was born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in 1939. He was educated at Jamaica College, and later at the University of the West Indies, where he received a B.A. in English. a He published his first collection of poetry in 1973. The...

Mother Night is based on personal experience, for it is a well-known fact that Vonnegut saw the horrors of the war with his own eyes. This work was published in 1961, for it took him some time to reflect on his role in the war. He also knew about...

The Last of the Mohicans takes place in the midst of the French-Indian war. Specifically, it focuses on one battle in a war that lasted for many years. This was the last and most important conflict over French and British possessions in North...

Hunters in the Snow and Other Stories, also published as The Stories of Tobias Wolff, is a collection of short stories by Professor Tobias Wolff at the University of Stanford. The collection was first published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

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They Cage the Animals at Night is an autobiography, written by Jennings Michael Burch. Burch was left at an orphanage when he was eight, and his mother, who was too sick to adequately take care of him, did not come back. At his young age, Burch...