First published in 1965, Frank Herbert’s Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel ever written and the first to win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Set on the arid planet Arrakis, the only…
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Few poets reshaped American literature as profoundly as Allen Ginsberg. When his Howl and Other Poems appeared in 1956, it broke open the polished, buttoned-down verse of the era with a raw, chanting, confessional voice…
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Today marks the birthday of Ernest Hemingway – born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His career reshaped modern prose, and his life unfolded across continents and decades. Over the years, we have handled…
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Nearly three thousand years after they were first composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain the foundation stones of Western literature. Homer’s epics gave us the wrath of Achilles and the long homeward voyage of…
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Some inscriptions reveal more in their modesty than a page of praise ever could. On the front free endpaper of a 1940 first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his…
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It is one of the great near-misses in modern publishing history. In 1953 a forty-one-year-old schoolmaster named William Golding finished a short, strange novel about a group of English boys stranded on a tropical island…
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