Newest Study Guides

Fresh off the success of 2000's Memento, Christopher Nolan was hired by Warner Bros in 2003 to reboot the Batman property. The result was 2005's Batman Begins, which he cowrote with David S. Goyer and which starred Christian Bale as Bruce...

Rocket Boys is a bestselling memoir by Homer Hickam published in 1998. It was made into a movie the year titled October Sky (an anagram of Rocket Boys) in the year following its publication, and the memoir was subsequently re-published under the...

The Return of Martin Geurre has roots in both fiction and non-fiction. The book, written in 1983 by Canadian and American author Natalie Zemon Davis, centers around the 16th century legendary story of Martin Geurre. Geurre, who had a wooden leg,...

How do you follow up a debut novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? The answer is, you don't - at least, not with another novel. University of Southern California professor, and multiple award winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen...

A young adult fantasy novel, Red Queen was published in 2015 and written by American author Victoria Aveyard. In the novel, there are different types of people - Reds and Silvers among them. The Silvers have special blood that gives them special...

"The Red Convertible" is a short story by American author Louise Erdrich. The story and its characters draw heavily on the author's own partial Native American background: Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa...

It is one thing to receive universal critical acclaim and commercial success with your debut novel, and quite another thing entirely to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for it; this extraordinary experience graced University of Southern...

Swallow the Air is the 2006 debut novel by Australian author Tara June Winch. It draws on Winch's own mixed ethnic background: while she is of partial European English descent, her father is a member of the Wiradjuri aboriginal nation of New South...

Published in 1969, The Sunflower is a memoir written by Austrian Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. The book poses the complex ethical dilemma faced by Wisenthal as he remained at a concentration camp. One day, he is called to the hospital by a...

After Jamaican-American author Nicola Yoon published her first novel and New York Times Bestselling book, Everything, Everything, in September 2015, she quickly began writing her next novel. The Sun Is Also a Star was as big of a hit as Yoon’s...

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a play written by Australian playwright Ray Lawler, and first performed on November 28, 1955. The play is very popular in Australian culture, as it was a breakthrough for true Australian theater. For one of the...

Spare Parts (2014) tells the story of four undocumented Mexican American students and their competition to build the best underwater robot -- even though they had never been to the ocean. In the end, the group built their robot and won the...

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a novel by American writer Lisa See. The book was published in 2005, and has about 250 pages. The book has to deal with China during the nineteenth centuries, when it was highly decentralized and refusing to adapt...

Small Great Things was published in 2016 by American author Jodi Picoult. The book has been such a hit that it is now being adapted to film. The title of the book was chosen from the words of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech,...

The Sixth Extinction was published by Elizabeth Kolbert in 2014 and would go on to earn the author the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. Inspired by such precursors as Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring,...

David Almond’s Skellig was published in 1998 and is considered one of the most significant works of children’s literature in the late 20th century.

Almond had already written short stories when what would be Skellig came to him. He told an...

In the Heat of the Night is a 1967 film directed by Norman Jewison with a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant based on the novel of the same name by John Ball. The film was produced by Walter Mirisch and won 5 Academy Awards while grossing over...

10:04 is a novel by American poet and writer Ben Lerner. His second fictional novel, 10:04 follows the story of a writer living in New York City that has become very successful. However, after being diagnosed with a serious heart condition, the...

Published in 2017 by Indian author Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that conveys some of the worst events in the history of modern India. One of these events, a new land reform, puts people in the book into extreme...

The career of Oliver Wendell Holmes as a poet can be said either to have begun with tremendous good luck or an ironic example of bad luck, depending upon the point of view. That career began in earnest while a young man growing disaffected by...

The poems of James Russell Lowell are very structured and are of general topics, like love and freedom, which were especially apparent in the Enlightenment Era. Indeed, this is when his poems were written, except they were published in America...

Bone Game is a novel by Irish-American author Louis Owens. The book, a murder mystery novel, features Cole McCurtain as the main character. Of mixed Native American heritage like the author himself, McCurtain is a professor of Native American...

Many argue that John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (originally published as a serial in August and September 1915 in Blackwood's Magazine) is one of the most influential thrillers ever written. The novel follows Richard Hannay after his return to...

Published in 1996, Indian Killer is a fictional novel that takes place in the city of Seattle. During the course of the novel, an outrageous serial killer runs about the city, undetected, scalping all of his victims. The murderer is believed to be...