Literary Criticism
Hunger
Hunger (Norwegian: Sult) is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. The novel has been hail…
Voltaire and the French Enlightenment
In this Little Blue Book Number 512, Will Durant describes François-Marie Arouet, the writer, historian, and philosopher known as Vol…
Steppenwolf
This controversial literary classic paints the portrait of a man who perceives himself to live in two worlds, that of the idealist, cowed an…
Growth of the Soil
Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. …
Alice Adams
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Alice Adams chronicles the attempts of a lower middle class American midwestern family at the turn of the 20…
The Man Who Laughs
The Man Who Laughs is a profound exploration of identity and societal perception, set against the backdrop of 17th-century England. The stor…
Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
This is Stowe's second book, another one depicting the horrors of southern slavery, published 4 years after Uncle Tom's Cabin and 5 years be…
The Metamorphosis
"The Metamorphosis" is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915 and one of his best known works. The story begins with a …
Tales of Unrest
Tales of Unrest is Joseph Conrad's first collection of short stories, published in 1898, showcasing his mastery of narrative and psychologic…
Bunyan Characters
Bunyan Characters by Alexander Whyte delves into the rich tapestry of characters from John Bunyan's seminal work, The Pilgrim's Progress. Th…
Lost Illusions
Ève and David (1843) is the final book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively t…
The Hidden Places
Hollister, returning home from the war physically scarred but otherwise healthy and intact, finds life difficult among society, and so choos…
The Portrait of a Lady
Our central character is Isabel Archer of Albany, New York, a young woman of no great means, and no great beauty (that is, by her own estima…
A Dozen Short Stories
Twelve of H. G. Wells' early short stories (1894-1925) originally printed in various magazines and papers. His earlier works delve into the …
Summer
The story is one of only two novels by Wharton to be set in New England. The novel details the sexual awakening of its protagonist, Charity …
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) was a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The main character in th…
A Hero of Our Time
A Hero of Our Time presents a complex exploration of the human condition through the life of Grigory Pechorin, a disenchanted young officer …
Oliver Twist
When orphaned Oliver Twist asks for more food, the workhouse board are horrified and immediately pack him off to work for an undertaker, who…
Royal Highness
Royal Highness is the story of Prince Klaus Heinrich, a member of a struggling German duchy and an exotic American heiress who comes to live…
The Cossacks
The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocra…