J. K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter series and several crime fiction novels, celebrates her birthday July 31st. A real-life "rags to riches" story, Forbes ranked her as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity in 2007. Take a look with us as we explore ten facts you might not know about the beloved author.
A bildungsroman is a novel which follows its protagonist during a significant period of maturation. The book focuses on the main character's childhood or adolescence over a span of years as she navigates the world and investigates her place in it. The bildungsroman became highly popular in 19th century British novels, particularly in the works of Charles Dickens, but still retains its popularity today. Discover more about this form and some essential bildungsromans in the following article.
Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 "for poetry that with ironic precision uncovers the laws of biology and historical mechanisms in fragments of human reality." Indeed, irony is a point of distinction in her work. Her poems are at once simple and yet complex. They are told engagingly from diverse perspectives, and are consistently endowed with her distinguished wit and cleverness.
Lately there's been much discussion over the Great American Novel. Any discussion on this subject cannot avoid mentioning that seminal masterpiece, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. On the surface it follows a teenager as he sails south along the Mississippi, but Twain was sure to pack in some of his century's most skillful satire.
Today, June 22nd, is renowned author Dan Browns birthday. He has much to celebrate considering Inferno, his latest book released last month, is the number-one hardcover novel on The New York Times Bestseller List. Since publishing The Da Vinci Code in 2003, he has been one of the worlds most popular (and controversial) authors, forever ingrained into the landscape of contemporary fiction. While it seems every book he releases becomes an overnight blockbuster, it may surprise you that Dan Brown wasnt always the King Midas of the modern thriller novel.
