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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...

Fences was written by August Wilson in 1983 and first performed at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway in 1987. Fences is the sixth play in Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle." The Cycle is a series of plays set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the ten...

The Lovely Bones, released in 2002, is Alice Sebold’s second published book, and her first published novel. The book sold almost three million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. The novel was translated into over...

The Rape of the Lock (1714) had its origins in an actual incident that occurred in 1711. Robert, Lord Petre surreptitiously cut a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor, who he had been courting at the time. The Fermors took offense, and a schism...

Pushing The Bear is an historical novel by Diane Glancy. It explores the lives of the Cherokee in the years spanning 1838-1839duribg their forced removal from their land along the Trail of Tears.

Glancy adheres strictly to historical accuracy and...

American Knees is a fictional novel written by Shawn Wong published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster. In 2005, it was re-issued by the University of Washington Press.

The novel was first published when Wong was 45. When asked about the title in an...

Published in 1922, Siddhartha is the most famous and influential novel by Nobel prize-winning (1946) German author Hermann Hesse. Though set in India, the concerns of Siddhartha are universal, expressing Hesse's general interest in the conflict...

Published in 1992 by Southern Methodist University Press, this novel is an historical account from a subjective humanized perspective rather than an objective event analysis. The novel delves in the American history through 1931 mining camp of...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an 18th century philosopher. His doctrines predominantly pertain to politics and the function of government, his most important work being The Social Contract. He was interested in adapting society to be most...

Particularities of the author:

Until 1995, Bolaño was a practically unknown author. Finding himself in a precarious economic situation, he sent the manuscript of “Nazi literature in America” to various publishers, finally being accepted by Seix...

Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 in French which was translated first into English by Just O'Brien in 1955. The book is a philosophical essay in four parts, "An Absurd Reasoning," "The Absurd Man," "Absurd Creation," and "The...

"The Kreutzer Sonata" is Leo Tolstoy's novel, published in 1890 and immediately censored by the tsarist authorities. The book proclaims the ideal of abstinence and describes in the first person anger of jealousy. The name of the story gave number...

Many of Hemingway’s short stories appeared in various magazines before being anthologized in his short story collections. The first of these collections, and his first major published work, was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); this collection...

The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy, that is, an English theatrical comedy written during the period 1660-1710, when theatrical performances resumed in London following their 18-year spell of illegality under the reign of the Puritan...

Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, The Story of Their Lives, A Girls’ Book was written by Louisa May Alcott and published in two parts. Roberts Brothers published the first part on September 30, 1868. After its success, with the first 2000...

Leaves of Grass has been considered by many critics to be the first and best example of American poetry, and Whitman to have been the first major American poet. Yet other critics have found the work obscene. Its greatness has been the topic of...

And Then There Were None was first published in 1939 in Great Britain and was published a few months later in the United States in January of 1940. It is Agatha Christie's bestselling novel. Over 100 million copies have been printed and it remains...

In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of...

Premiering in 1905 and published in 1907, Major Barbara is a three-part play written by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, and critic. The plot revolves around a young woman named Barbara who is in the Salvation Army, and her efforts to...