The novel Baltasar and Blimunda, written in 1984, advanced José Saramago (1922–2010) from national popularity to international recognition. The historical novel was translated from the Portuguese into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1986. José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize… Read More ›
Badenheim 1939 is a skillful fictional answer to the question that many have asked about the Holocaust: Why was there not more resistance? Perhaps the answer to the question is something much more simple than has been considered, as Holocaust… Read More ›
The German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) started work in 1938 on one of his major novels, The Axe of Wandsbek, a psychological analysis of individual behavior in everyday life under the Third Reich. It depicts the evil in the structures… Read More ›
This novel appeared seven years after One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the author has said that he began it much earlier, as early as January 1958, when as a journalist he witnessed the ouster of President Pérez Jiménez in… Read More ›
A gripping novel that challenges the notions of innocence and guilt, The Assault is considered among the greatest works of contemporary European fiction. Broken into five episodes, spanning 1945 to 1981, the novel by Dutch author Harry Mulisch (1927–2010) is… Read More ›
The fifth published novel by Germany’s Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), Arch of Triumph was first published in the United States in 1945; the German edition followed in 1946. The story takes place in Paris between November 11, 1938, and the… Read More ›
This later novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is markedly different from his most well-known work, Things Fall Apart (1958), in both form and content. The novel, set in a fictional 20th-century African country representative of Nigeria, examines the… Read More ›
The Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote Amerika between 1911 and 1914, but the novel was not published until 1927, several years after the author’s death. Kafka never crossed the Atlantic to America, and much of his knowledge of the… Read More ›
All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the disillusionment of Paul Baumer, a young foot soldier fighting in World War I. Written by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), this depiction of the horrors of war is one of the most renowned… Read More ›
Published just following World War II, All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) speaks vehemently and passionately against vanity, the desire to control, and the desire for dictatorial power. Curious and existential, it is a type of philosophical… Read More ›
The most popular novel of the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (1947– ), The Alchemist combines philosophical ideas and words of wisdom about ambition, perseverance, and success. Since its publication in 1988, the novel has has sold over 150 million copies… Read More ›
The post–World War II novel Absent without Leave represents something of a change of literary pace for Heinrich Böll (1917–85), at least in terms of its formal and stylistic strategies. Although some thematic concerns persist from his earlier work of… Read More ›
This novella contrasts life-giving and life-denying attitudes, key themes in D. H. Lawrence’s stories. Salient details of Midlands country life give this story its realism: A miner’s widow plans brussels sprouts, meat, and apple pie for dinner; moleskin trousers smell… Read More ›
Originally subtitled “A Study,” this novella was first published by Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf, in the Cornhill Magazine. The choice of a British press cost Henry James his American rights. The sheer amount of pirated versions, however,… Read More ›
Cousin Phyllis is one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s later works and one in which she returns to the rural Cheshire of her youth. Cousin Phyllis was first published by George Smith in his Cornhill Magazine in four monthly parts from November… Read More ›
This short novel is one of the products of Rudyard Kipling’s residence in the United States from 1892 to 1896. What Kipling described as a “boy’s story” was first published in serial form in McClure’s Magazine in the United States… Read More ›
The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” and Virginia Woolf’s assertion that sometime around December 1910 “human character changed” are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is… Read More ›
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, Love Medicine began as a short story. Its author, Louise Erdrich, in close collaboration with her husband, Michael Dorris, planned it as a novel, yet many readers view it as… Read More ›
It is difficult to find appropriate words to define Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) significance in Canadian culture and literature. Atwood is a prolific writer who not only blazes a trail for contemporary Canadian writers but also helps Canadian… Read More ›
SYNOPSIS Volume 1 Emma is the story of the wealthy, beautiful, spoiled only daughter of an aging widowed hypochondriac, Mr. Woodhouse. Nearly 21, she runs their large house, Hartfield, in Highbury, Surrey. The novel opens with the marriage of her… Read More ›
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