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Classic Literature
Take a closer look before judging a book by its title.
An insect? A vermin? An unwanted animal? What in the world is Franz Kafka talking about?
Bram Stoker's mother survived a terrible cholera outbreak and recounted the ghastly scenes to her son years later.
For the clarity of a “beginner’s mind” and a path to true and lasting wisdom, one must fully embrace "not-knowing."
From forgotten Hollywood movies to Frank Herbert’s "Dune," science fiction illustrates some of our deepest fears about technology.
Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the "Codex Amiatinus," a Latin translation of the Bible.
You can learn a lot about life through literature's most unrespectable and heinous characters.
Forgetting and misremembering are the building blocks of creativity and imagination.
Not every classic enjoyed rave reviews from the start.
Some authors never saw their books score widespread acclaim—or even get published at all.
Though Sun Tzu’s "The Art of War" is a classic military treatise, its advice applies to all manner of conflict.
Try writing a novel without using the letter "e."
Monsters have always represented societal fears, but narrative art also casts doubt on whether we fully understand our monsters — and their slayers.
Some classic books, like Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," remain controversial to this day.
What is Captain America doing in ancient Mesopotamia?
Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
Take a trip through these master-crafted fantasy societies and ask yourself: Could I actually live there?
"Painfully forced" is how one contemporary critic described Fitzgerald's writing style.
Would you want to live in any of these places?
Art criticism is inherently subjective. Still, many critics have tried to make a case for why some of the world’s most celebrated books are in fact terribly written.
These five great books should prompt us to work on what needs fixing the most in the world: ourselves.
A Cambridge Ph.D. student has solved a grammatical problem that has befuddled Sanskrit scholars since the 5th century BC.
"Tristram Shandy" trolled its way to fame.
Today’s scary clowns are not a divergence from tradition, but a return to it.
Because Dylan “samples and digests” songs from the past, he has been accused of plagiarism. But imitatio isn't the same.
Forget about Tinkerbell.
One award was for a medical procedure that incapacitated thousands of people.
Books that were rarely taught in 1963, when baby boomers were students, became classics when those same boomers were teachers and parents.