A Christmas Carol is a novella written by Charles Dickens. This is a story about a selfish and greedy old man, Ebenezer Scrooge, who hates everything related to Christmas. After the visit of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Scrooge is changed into a gentler and kinder man.
Walden and Civil Disobedience
"Walden and Civil Disobedience" is a collection that includes two of the works of the famous American writer Henry David Thoreau. "Walden", perhaps Thoreau's most famous work, was published in 1854. Originally published under the title, "Walden; or, Life in the Woods", the novel experienced some success after it's release but went out of print […]
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself" is a memoir published by Frederick Douglass in 1845. The book tells the story of Douglass's early life as a slave in Maryland. His memoir begins with his birth as the son of a slave woman, and probably, the master of the […]
Flowers for Algernon
"Flowers for Algernon" is a novel written by Daniel Keyes and published in 1966. The book received critical acclaim despite some backlash for it's representation of sexual themes and is still considered one of the classics of the 20th century. It has been adapted a variety of times including television, radio, theater and an Academy-Award […]
The Poisonwood Bible
"The Poisonwood Bible" is a novel written by Barbara Kingsolver and published in 1998. The book was an immediate success and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 1999. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction that same year and in the year 2000 won the South African Boeke Prize. The […]
Ethan Frome
"Ethan Frome", published in 1911 by Edith Wharton, is the story of a man who is trapped by duty. This novella is different from the kind of books Wharton usually wrote involving the upper classes from which she came. Ethan Frome begins with an Engineer who is temporarily staying in a small town in Massachusetts. […]
The Last of the Mohicans
"The Last of the Mohicans" is the second book in a series written by James Fenimore Cooper and published in 1840. These books were part of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy. It was preceded by The Pioneers, published in 1823, and The Prairie, published in 1827. "The Pathfinder" is the next in the series and published […]
Maus: A Survivors Tale Part Two
"Maus: A Survivors Tale Part Two - And Here My Troubles Began" is the second in a two-part graphic novel series that was written by Art Spiegelman. The comic was originally published in monthly comic strips in the magazine Raw from December 1980 to 1991 when the magazine was disbanded. Every chapter but the last […]
Maus: A Survivor's Tale Part One
"Maus: A Survivor's Tale Part One - My Father Bleeds History" is the first in a two-part graphic novel series that was written by Art Spiegelman. The comic was originally published in monthly comic strips in the magazine Raw from December 1980 to 1991 when the magazine was disbanded. Every chapter but the last one […]
Pygmalion
"Pygmalion", a play by George Bernard Shaw was first presented on the stage in 1913. The play is about a young cockney flower girl that is transformed into a lady by the phonetics professor Henry Higgins. Eliza Doolittle wants to improve her life and social standing, so when she overhears two gentlemen challenging each other […]
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
"Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented" is the title of an 1891 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. The novel was originally published in serial form by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic the year before it's official release in 1892. The book was well received by the public and became […]
The Bell Jar
"The Bell Jar" is a novel written by the American poet Sylvia Plath and published in 1963. Plath originally published the story under the pen name Victoria Lucas. However, after her death a month after it's publishing, the novel was reissued under her real name. "The Bell Jar" is the only novel written by Plath, […]
The Handmaid's Tale
"The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985 by Margaret Atwood. It is a dystopian novel and a work of speculative fiction. The story is set in an alternate time. The United States of America has fallen under a military dictatorship. The country is called the Republic of Gilead. The change begins with a staged terrorist […]
Rip Van Winkle
"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story written by the American author Washington Irving and published in 1819. The story was originally published as part of a collection called "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent". The story was written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England. The story was one of the biggest successes […]
The Jungle
"The Jungle" is a novel published in 1906 by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a journalist whose main object was typical to expose corruption by government and businesses. In writing "The Jungle" he aimed to produce a novel that exposed the harsh working conditions of immigrants in Chicago during the early […]
The House of the Seven Gables
"The House of the Seven Gables" is a Gothic novel written by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in 1851. The book was inspired by a gabled house in the town of Salem, Massachusetts that belonged to Hawthorne's cousin, Susanna Ingersoll and by Hawthorne's own knowledge of the part that his ancestors played in […]
The Last Days of Socrates
"The Last Days of Socrates" is a book on the philosophical discussions between Socrates and Plato. It is divided into four sections: "Euthyphro", "The Apology", "Crito", and "Phaedo". Socrates never recorded any of his teachings, so after his conviction and forced suicide, his student, Plato, who was a renown poet in his time, wrote Socrates' words […]
Atlas Shrugged
"Atlas Shrugged" was published in 1957 by Ayn Rand. It is her fourth and last novel. She considered it to be her magnum opus. It contains romance, science fiction, and mystery. The book also promotes Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. The book is a dystopian story set in the United States. The industrialists reach a point […]
The Joy Luck Club
"The Joy Luck Club" was published in 1989 and written by Amy Tan. The book follows four women and their daughters. The women emigrated from China and joined together in San Francisco in 1949, to play mah jong. They formed a club they called the Joy Luck Club. At the meetings they gossiped while playing […]
The Martian Chronicles
The Martian Chronicles is a brilliant collection of short stories written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1946. The stories are episodic, telling a dystopian future of expeditions to Mars. With the first expedition, a Martian kills the Captain before he can make contact. Then the second expedition is considered to be a hallucination. The […]
The Lord of the Flies
"The Lord of the Flies" is a novel written by William Golding and published in 1954. This novel was Golding's first and was not a huge success at the time of it's release, selling only about 3,000 copies in the United States during it's first year on the market before going out of print. However, […]
Paradise Lost
"Paradise Lost" is an epic poem written by the English poet John Milton and first published 1667. The first version of the poem was made up of ten books and over ten thousand lines of verse. A later edition organized the poem into twelve books. The book is considered by many scholars to be Milton's […]
The Grapes of Wrath
"The Grapes of Wrath" is a classic novel by the American author John Steinbeck originally published in 1939. The book became a huge topic of discussion in the country at the time and was both hated and loved by Americans. It was the best-selling book in the country the year it was released and over […]
Memoirs of a Geisha
Published in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha is the story of a nine-year-old girl who grows up to be the most famous geisha in her time. Chiyo was the second daughter of a fisherman's. Her father was very old and her mother was his second wife. When their mother became deathly ill, their father knew […]
Death of a Salesman
Written in 1948 in one day shortly after moving into his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, Death of a Salesman became one of Arthur Miller's most famous works. The story of a middle-aged salesman who is facing a mid-life crisis, and on a downward slide to suicide. He is haunted by the ghosts of his past […]
The Sun Also Rises
"The Sun Also Rises" is a 1926 novel written by the famed American author Ernest Hemingway. The novel's main theme is that of the "Lost Generation" or the generation of young men that were seen to be irrevocably damaged by World War I and Hemingway's assertion that they were not as decadent and dissolute as […]
The Chrysalids
"The Chrysalids" is a science fiction novel written by John Wyndham and published in 1955. The book was given mixed reviews with some lauding it for its originality and other's finding it too hard to believe. In 1970, the novel was adapted into a radio serial for the BBC. The novel revolves around a young […]
The Pale King
The Pale King was published posthumously in 2011. The book was an unfinished novel written by David Foster Wallace and found by his wife after his death. The book is haphazard, as is Wallace's style. He worked on it for over a decade. Most of the stories follow the employees of the Internal Revenue Service […]
Grendel
Published in 1971 by the American author, John Gardner, Grendel is a powerful novel using the voice of the monster in Beowulf, an Old English epic poem. In the way of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, the monster is lonely and questioning his existence. These writers used monsters […]
A Clockwork Orange
"A Clockwork Orange" is a dystopian future novel written by Anthony Burgess and published in 1962. The book was successful in part due to its fascinating usage of a slang developed by Burgess that combines English Cockney rhyming slang, modified Slavic words and many words that Burgess made up himself. The slang is referred to […]