As I write my reader response on Grace Paley's story "Distance" the only weak point I found was the dialect, making it was hard to read. The short story begins awkwardly confusing, and ends abruptly. Other than that, I found the story to be creative. I put down the book having known a funny, toug...

Shakespeare is relevant to my life in many different ways. He gives me pleasure while I read any of his novels, especially when they are talking about Love. Love has a big part in Shakespeare's writings. It is the most important thing in the world. It brings happiness and peace. Shakespear...

Edgar A. Poe After reading some of his works in class, one realizes that his mysterious style of writing is greatly appealing. Although many critics have different views on Poe's writing style, it was said, "Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurkin...

This is the biography of John Champlin Gardner, Jr., an American writer, who was born in Batavia, New York. He was a teacher, lecturer, and prolific writer of fiction, children's books, poetry, radio plays, and scholarly medieval studies. He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, graduated i...

this is done through his use of setting and narrative style. In many of Poe's works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our minds. I think that this was done deliberatly by Poe so that the reader can make a connection between darkness and death. For example, in the "Pit and the ...

Ray Bradbury is more than just a legendary American novelist. He is also a short story writer, essayist, playwright screenwriter, poet, an owner of four cats, a father to four daughters, a grandfather to eight grandchildren, and he was a husband to Maggie until her death in November of 2003. They we...

Hemingway's Iceberg In the works of Ernest Hemingway, prose style is as important to the work as the content. Hemingway's style includes the use of short, choppy sentences that are descriptive and have underlying meanings that are integral to the work. Hemingway uses this technique, th...

The Advantages of a First-Person Perspective in Literature There are several angles in which an author can tell a story. Writing a story in the first-person perspective, though, is the best angle because it has many advantages for both the reader and the author of the story. The reader will lea...

My reading habits have changed over the years. As a child I had more time to read than I have been able to as an adult. I had different tastes in books when I was younger as well. Even though my habits and reading preferences have changed over the years, I still enjoy it as much as I did as a youngs...

"Game" Written AnalysisBackground--Barthelme was an artist and sculptor. This fact explains his meticulous attention to giving the reader the setting so realistically. Donald Barthelme " paints" the setting in the reader's mind. As Donald artistically puts together the story elements, his creative...

Can You Tell a True War Story? Tim O'Brien's short story "How to Tell a True War Story" is his fictional depiction of one of the narrator's experiences in the Vietnam War. This first person account of a tragic death of a friend is the example that the author uses to prov...

Sonny's Blues We all have at least one promise in our lives that we regret not keeping and not all of us have the chance to fix that broken promise. In the story Sonny's Blues written by James Baldwin the narrator gets a second chance to keep his promise. In keeping a promise to moth...

Oscar Fingal O\'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and poet. He was part of the Decadence, a loosely affiliated coterie of writers and artists of the 1890s whose lives and works manifested a highly stylized, decorative mann...

"A rose for Emily" reveals William Faulkner's highly technical style of writing. The motif of the story can be understood in several different ways such as cultural conflict between Southern and Northern America or as conflict between old and New generations. However there is more than that which au...

J.D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is a literary display of ingenious creativity. Salinger's novel fits the archetypal pattern of an anti-romance; however, the novel is unique in how it follows that pattern. A distinct way in which Salinger makes this novel unique is by having the stre...

Truman Capote, one of America's more colorful literary personalities, was born in New Orleans in 1924 and died in California in 1984. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction -- short stories, novels and novellas, travel writing, profiles, reportage, memoirs, plays and films. His work of fiction that i...

There are two kinds of writing, Commercial and Literary. Commercial or escapist pieces are purely for the reader's entertainment and for making money. Literary works however are often crafted with a deeper meaning designed purposefully to make the reader think and are rarely predictable. The...

To the Stars Ray Bradbury was a great writer on many levels. He could write novels, short stories, essays, plays, screenplays, and poetry. An active imagination and a fascination with outer space combine in many of Ray Bradbury's stories. Ray Bradbury surpassed an unstable childhood to become a worl...

How often has one heard the question mostly posed by current students, Why must I know and take courses in literature? The question itself is not too surprising because many students do not feel they need any of the education they are getting to continue their life. What is surprising is how the ...

Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" is considered to be by critics and readers alike one of the most significant novels of the African American literature. It is the creative result of one of the most acclaimed writers of the American cultural scene. The author draws her inspiration and...

For many centuries, the Western Canon of literary works has set a standard for education by presenting the great and outstanding literary works of the past. As multiculturalism and equality thrive in the new millennium, the validity of the seemingly racially and sexually discriminating canon is bei...

Virginia Woolf, in her novels, set out to portray the self and the limits associated with it. She wanted the reader to understand time and how the characters could be caught within it. She felt that time could be transcended, even if it was momentarily, by one becoming involved with their work, art...

My Book Review on The Mysterious ManMark Twain's fiction novel, The Mysterious Man is about an angle that comes to a town in Austria during the Middle Ages. The angle goes there to help the priest Father Peter out of a rut, which the evil astrologer had put him into. The mysterious angle also helps ...