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Water For Elephants is an historical novel by Sara Gruen. It was written as part of National Novel Writing Month. Gruen has said that the backbone of her story parallels the biblical story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis.

The unusual title comes...

All Souls: A Family Story From Southie is an autobiographical memoir written by Michael Patrick MacDonald and published by Beacon Press in September 1999. The writing recounts MacDonald's growing up in the Old Colony Housing Projects in South...

John Charles Chasteen, born in 1955, is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Rejecting much of the neocolonialist depictions of Latin America commonly found in history texts, he saw a need for a textbook that presented Latin...

The Second Treatise of Government was published amidst the turmoil and upheaval of late-17th century English politics. In 1690 when it anonymously entered the canon of great works of political theory, the absolute monarch King James II had been...

Charlotte Temple was Susanna Rowson's second novel, and her first to receive financial success. The novel is a didactic melodrama, intended to teach young women how to behave honorably and avoid falling in with unsavory people, whether they be men...

Bertolt Brecht wrote Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (translated literally as “The Good Person of Setzuan”) with Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau between the years of 1938 and 1943. Steffin was a German actress, writer, and translator, and Brecht's...

Like Water for Chocolate, published in 1989, is Laura Esquivel’s first novel. Part cookbook, part fiction, this best-selling work retells the story of the De la Garza family with a specific focus on Tita de la Garza. Every chapter begins with a...

The Emigrants was written by Winfried Georg Sebald, which was first published during 1992 and was later published during 2002 by Vintage. This story plainly documents the lives of four German/Jewish emigrants during the twentieth century. Sebald's...

Pragmatism and Other Writings is a collection of William James’ writings and lectures that was compiled and published in 2000. Though his philosophical writings were concentrated in the late 1800s, this collection compiles some of the most...

The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited publishers under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, for Sylvia Plath questioned the literary value of the novel and did not believe that it was a "serious work."...

Specials is the last part of the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. The novel's target audience is young adults and it is filled with action and adventure of the young teenage girl called Tally. This novel represents Tally's final transformation...

Pretties is a novel written by Scott David Westerfeld and published in 2005. It is the second installment of the Uglies trilogy. Pretties is a young adult, science fiction novel that tells of a dystopian world that forces every 16 year old to have...

Bernard Malamud was an American author born on April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. He came from a humble background considering his parents were both Russian immigrants and he worked everyday as a teacher’s assistant to support his family. After...

Annie John is a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985. The book revolves around Annie John, a young girl growing up in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. Annie loves her mother and follows her around everywhere, which is why she is distressed...

All but My Life is an inspirational and powerful story of Gerda Weissman Klein's life during World War II and the Holocaust. In her hometown of Bielitz, Poland, the Nazis invaded, and the situation quickly became increasingly hostile and...

Frequently considered as the first novel of the Young Adult genre, Across Five Aprils is a historical novel by written Irene Hunt and set in the civil war. It was published in 1964 by Berkley and won the 1965 Newbery Honor. Across Five Aprils...

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to roughly 2000 BCE. It is believed to be one of the earliest works of literature in human history. Scholars believe that its origins were in ancient Sumerian poems that...

Federico García Lorca maintained a lifelong interest in the music and culture of rural Spain, a fascination that heavily influenced one of his most acclaimed tragedies, Blood Wedding. More directly, the play was inspired by a sensational crime...

H. Rider Haggard came to literary prominence with the publication of King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. Haggard self-consciously modeled the book on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which Haggard had read. He bet his brother that he could...

Desperate Characters is a novel written by Paula Fox in 1970 and published by W.W. Norton & Company. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Sophie and Otto Brentwood. They are a middle-class and middle-aged couple who are wealthy and of...

Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. The novel is told in as a collection of short stories revolving around a circle of friends, who some of them are heroin users. The seven sections of the...

The Famished Road is a fantasy Booker-Prize winning novel written by Ben Okri and was published in the United Kingdom on 14 March 1991 by Jonathan Cape publishers.

The novel follows the life of Azaro, a spirit child, travelling in Nigeria. Azaro...

Jeanette Winterson is an English author born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England. She grew up in a very religious household, but her sexual identity as a lesbian often conflicted with the values of her Church. At age 16, she decided to leave...

I, Robot is not exactly a novel in the traditional sense. And yet, it is something more than a mere collection of loosely connected short stories as well. In addition to the recurrence of certain characters, the unifying aspect that maintains the...