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Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

by Francine Levitov

Tue, Sep 01, 2009

William Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, Naked Lunch. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991.

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Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

by Mary Purucker

Tue, Sep 01, 2009

Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality.

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The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

by Pat Dole

Tue, Sep 01, 2009

Henry James described his horror classic as a simple ghost story. Noting that nothing "The Master" wrote was ever simple, some critics point to this work as a tale told by a neurotic, sexually repressed, unreliable narrator. There's plenty of room for both points of view.

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