In chapter Seven of The Queen of Air and Darkness,  the second tome in  T. H. White's  Tetrology that retells  the King Arthur Saga in modern language, we find the four troubled  adolescent sons of  the sorceress Q...

In The Human Stain, written in 2001, Philip Roth provocatively examines the drama of racial identity and identity politics in America through an intriguing lens.   The book is written as a reconstructed biography of Coleman Silk, a literat...

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit twenty years before  his famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Conceived as a children's novel, chiefly to entertain his young children, it is quite different in style and tone from the trilogy, even though it...

Vladimir Nabokov began writing  Pnin in 1954, around the time his Lolita was being finalized. It was at first published in period installments in The  New Yorker before a revised version came out in book for...

Thomas Mann constructed Doktor Faustus as a chronicle of the life and tragedy of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by his childhood friend, Serenus Zeitblom. This excerpt  is taken from the eighth chapter, describing a music lec...

This is the final chapter of the book.If you are not familiar with the novel, the beginning of my excerpt probably won't mean much to you as it breaks down the murder mystery that wove itself through the story. But hang in there,  it's...

Born in Holland in 1931 and raised in Austria and Germany, Thomas Bernhard was one of the most successful but also most contested writers of his generation. His writing style combined a highly musical approach, based on variations o...