Novels – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

Top Writing Resources to Enhance Your Writing Creativity

By Kate Funk

When writing creative content, writers need to have inspiration. What makes creative writing different from other forms of writing is that it requires a certain level of creativity and dexterity. From newbie to highly proficient writers, many would use various creative writing tools to come up with quality work. The Internet is home to a wide array of tools for this purpose. By effectively using these tools, it makes creative writing much easier and much more fun. So, what are some of the best tools that are specifically designed to unleash your writing creativity?

Five Fascinating Facts about The Maze Runner

Interesting Maze Runner facts: James Dashner’s a-mazing series of dystopian novels

1. Although some fans have made comparisons between The Maze Runner and other recent young adult dystopian novels, the idea for the series came to its author some ten years ago. Many readers and moviegoers have noted the superficial similarities between The Maze Runner (Maze Runner Series) and the most successful dystopian series of the last decade, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. (We’ve offered some interesting Hunger Games facts in an earlier post.) Dashner has discussed the book’s genesis, which dates back to November 2005: ‘I went to bed, and somehow this idea popped in my head about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable Maze full of hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world. It would be an experiment, to study their minds. Terrible things would be done to them. Awful things. Completely hopeless. Until the victims turn everything on its head.’ The first novel, which establishes the world in which several further books are also set, is a cleverly plotted page-turner (Dashner is not afraid to draw on the cliffhanger device at the end of his brief, action-packed chapters), and the film adaptation garnered largely positive reviews.

Five Fascinating Facts about Ben-Hur

Interesting facts about the Lew Wallace book Ben-Hur, and its subsequent life on film

1. It was the bestselling American novel of the nineteenth century. Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1880) even outsold that other runaway bestseller, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). And this was despite slow sales: in the first seven months it didn’t even shift 3,000 copies. The novel’s protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur (a figure invented by Wallace, and not someone who is known in history), is a Jewish nobleman and prince who is taken slave by the Romans (fitted up on a false charge of attempted murder, when a piece of his roof accidentally dropped on the Roman parade passing his house) and becomes a charioteer in the Roman games.

Jules Verne: Author or Fortune Teller?

By Spencer Blohm

Jules Verne is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in the history of science fiction. But his novels contain more than just entertainment. His wild imagination and propensity for thorough research led not only to enthralling adventure stories, but some eerily accurate predictions in the realm of scientific advancement.

In the 1870 classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Verne describes the Nautilus, an underwater vessel capable of traversing the ocean’s depths. A ship of this concept had never been seen by the protagonists of the novel, or by its readers at the time. While primitive submarines existed at the time, electric powered subs like the Nautilus wouldn’t come about until the early 1900s.

The Best Joseph Conrad Novels

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Joseph Conrad wrote numerous full-length novels, but what were Conrad’s best books? From his debut in 1895, Almayer’s Folly, to his final novel, Suspense (which he left unfinished – aptly, given the novel’s title – upon his death in 1924), Conrad’s fiction is an intriguing blend of difficult prose, exotic locations, adventure and betrayal, and moral and philosophical contemplation.

What follows is our pick of the best Joseph Conrad novels which everyone should read, presented in order where number 1 is ‘the best’ (a judgment that is bound to attract disagreement!). We’ve tried to steer clear of ‘spoilers’ per se, and instead offer very general summaries of the principal setup of the books being discussed.