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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...

The Professor’s House was published in 1925, but had been in the works since Cather’s 1915 trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado. The park is widely recognized as the home of some of the world's best-preserved cliff...

The Marrow of Tradition is considered to be one of the most important works of African American realist fiction. It is a novel based upon a historical account of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riots of 1898. The riots were, actually, a coup d...

Tuesdays with Morrie is based on the real-life relationship with author Mitch Albom and his college professor Morrie Schwartz. Morrie had been one of Mitch's favorite professors in college, and on graduation day, Mitch presented Morrie with a...

The Death of Iv?n Ilych was published in 1886, several years after a period of depression and personal intellectual turmoil (1875-1878) that ended with Tolstoy's conversion to Christianity.

Tolstoy's Christianity is well known, but his ideas about...

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...

Salmon Rushdie first began orally composing the stories that comprise Haroun and the Sea of Stories while writing his famous novel The Satanic Verses. During this time, Rushdie's nine-year-old son, Zafar, chastised his father for not writing books...

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...

“Emma” was first published by John Murray in December of 1815. It was the last of Austen’s novels to be published before her death, and, like her earlier works, was published anonymously. Shortly before the publication of “Emma,” Austen was...

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...

Main Street is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920.

The satirical novel criticizes the small-town lifestyle, classing it amongst Lewis' contemporaries as somewhat bleak in nature.The reception amongst real-life small-town residents was...

Grendel was published in 1971. Ostensibly a retelling of the Beowulf epic, Grendel is in fact a dark fable concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of society and individuality, as well as the place of art in a world of competing ideologies....

Through the Looking Glass is Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland. A few of the characters who appeared in Wonderland reappear in Through the Looking Glass, including Alice's cat and the Hatter and the Hare. More significantly, however, is the...