The “formalist” approach to literature says, among other things, that the author's opinion of what a piece of writing means is no more or...

For a fairly simple story, the title of this novel is – let's face – a trifle confusing. “Elective Affinities”? What the heck does that...

Authors who take pen names are nothing new – Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens, for instance, or even J.K. Rowling for Joanne Rowling. It's...

I'm sorry to tell my millions of readers that I can't really tell why this work appears on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”...

Everyone agrees that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a great author and very likely a great man. Some of his work, such as “The Sorrows Of...

“ "Anton Reiser" doesn't read like a novel, a memoir, an autobiography, or a philosophical treatise. At times, it reads like all those...

This is one of those items of popular culture that impacts the society to such an extent that the mere fact of its existence is almost...

Our original title is Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, and our author's full name was Hans Jakob Christoffel von...