Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891. The “fine and handsome” daughter of a poor country peddler, with evidently little more than her brimming emotions and her “large innocent eyes” to distinguish her from the other gi... Read More
Jane Austen, for some, is simply the supreme English novelist, on any list. Some will say: she is the greatest. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Of... Read More
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Persuasion was the last novel Jane Austen completed, and it didn’t appear in print until 1818 after she had passed away. It’s also shorter than most of her other novels, and some critics think that, because she wrote t... Read More
The reception history of Jane Austen follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. During her lifetime, Austen's novels brought her little personal fame. Like many women writers, she chose to publish anonymously, but her authorship was an open secret. Jane Austen’s Love and Freindship is part of the second volume of Austen’s Juvenilia, short works she wrote from 1787 to 1793 mostly to ent... Read More
Novel-writing was a suspect occupation for women in the early 19th century because it imperilled their social reputation by bringing them publicity, viewed as unfeminine. Therefore, like many other female writers, Austen published anonymously. Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen that was published anonymously in three volumes in 1811 and that became a classic. The satirical, comic w... Read More
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction - 'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, in 1803. However... Read More
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist," she has said that for many years she was "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country." Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot is an account of the Pussy Riot protest, the ensuing global support movement, an... Read More
British writer Doris Lessing felt that “a writer’s job is to provoke questions.” Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing, is about a white farmer and his wife and their African servant in Rhodesia. Among her most substantial works is the series Children of Violence, a five-novel sequence that centres on Martha Quest, who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. The Golden Note... Read More
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirtysomething singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. She was part of the screenwriting team on the associated movies. Bridget Jones begins the year with a set of resolutions dedicated to... Read More
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter. She worked for many years in London as a newspaper and TV journalist, travelling as wildly and as often as possible to Africa, India and Central America. She is the author of four novels: Cause Celeb, Bridget Jones’ s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, and co-wrote the screenplays for... Read More
Helen Fielding is the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries. She also won British Book of the Year award for Bridget Jones’s Diary. She received her early education from Wakefield Girls High School and then she went on to major in English from St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Moreover, she performed... Read More
James Patterson studied English at Manhattan College and at Vanderbilt University. After abandoning graduate school, he had originally intended to complete a doctorate, he found employment as a junior copywriter at an advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson Co., in New York City. His first attempt at fiction, a dark, stylized crime novel called The Thomas Berryman Number, won the Edgar Allan Poe... Read More
James Brendan Patterson is an American author and philanthropist. Patterson was born on March 22, 1947, in Newburgh, New York, the son of Isabelle, a homemaker and teacher, and Charles Patterson, an insurance broker. In 1996 Patterson quit his advertising job to concentrate on writing. While continuing to work on the profitable Alex Cross series, he began to branch out into other literary genre... Read More
James Brendan Patterson is an American author and philanthropist. Patterson was a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt but acquired a job in advertising. He was an advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson. In November 2015, Patterson received the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, which cited him as a "passionate campaigner to make books and reading a national priority. A generous su... Read More
James Patterson, in full James Brendan Patterson, Jr., is an American author, principally known for his thriller and suspense novels, whose prolific output and business savvy made him a ubiquitous presence on best-seller lists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By the early 1990s, Patterson had modified his approach to writing fiction, adopting a style characterized by unadorned prose,... Read More
James Brendan Patterson is an American author and philanthropist. It was Patterson who first showed that television advertising could work for books. More radically, he has demonstrated that working with co‑writers can dramatically multiply sales. Patterson has been criticized for co-authoring many of his books and for being more of a brand that focuses on making money than an artist who focuse... Read More
James Brendan Patterson is an American author and philanthropist. Patterson was born in 1947 in Newburgh, a town that was then "the all-American city, and is now the murder capital of New York state". He has said that money was not plentiful when growing up, but greater poverty came from the emotional detachment of his father. "He never had a father around himself and while you did feel there w... Read More
Candace Bushnell is an American author, journalist, and television producer. She wrote a column for The New York Observer that was adapted into the bestselling Sex and the City anthology. The book was the basis for the HBO hit series Sex and the City and two subsequent movies. Trading Up is her 2003 romance novel. In the London Guardian, Stephanie Merritt wrote that the book "succeeds because s... Read More
Candace Bushnell is the critically acclaimed, international best-selling author of Killing Monica, Sex and the City, Summer and the City, The Carrie Diaries, One-Fifth Avenue, Lipstick Jungle, Trading Up, and Four Blondes. Sex and the City, published in 1996, was the basis for the HBO hit series and two subsequent blockbuster movies. Bushnell was contracted by HarperCollins in 2008 to write a s... Read More
Candace Bushnell is an American author, journalist, and television producer. She wrote a column for The New York Observer that was adapted into the bestselling Sex and the City anthology. The book was the basis for the HBO hit series Sex and the City and two subsequent movies. At the age of 19, Bushnell moved to New York City and sold a children's story to Simon & Schuster. She attended Ric... Read More