Newest Study Guides

Love and Vertigo is a novel by Malaysian-born Australian novelist Hsu-Ming Teo. It was published in 2000 and was the recipient of the Australian Vogel's Literary Award.

The plot of Love and Vertigo revolves around a young Australian woman named...

Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film The Great Gatsby is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name. The novel is a classic, taught almost universally in high school English classes and touted as one of the most important works of American...

A classic of 20th-century literature, The Once and Future King is based loosely on the epic Middle French poem Le Mort d'Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century. Malory's text chronicles the early life, career, and death of the...

All Creatures Great and Small is a novel written by James Herriot, the pen name for James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight. It is the first book in a series, followed by the novels: All Things Bright and Beautiful (1972), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977), ...

The Iceman Cometh is often deemed Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus. It is a towering, profound, and lengthy work that manages to conjure up the universal and existential amidst the conversations of bums, derelicts, and dreamers at a rundown bar in...

Alien (1979) is a highly regarded and influential film in the Thriller/Science Fiction/Horror genres. The film was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. Ridley Scott also had been the director of the well-received film The...

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge is Michel Foucault’s landmark 1978 study, originally published in French, of the historical and political circumstances under which sexuality, as we know it, was formed. The book largely...

The Haunting of Hill House is considered Shirley Jackson’s best work and perhaps the quintessential haunted house novel. A delicate but insidious mediation on the feminine, the supernatural, psychological trauma, and the oppression of family and...

Dr. Strangelove was written and produced at the height of the Cold War, amidst such escalations as the Berlin Crisis (the closing of the border between Soviet East Berlin and democratic West Berlin) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (the establishment...

In retrospect, the most daring film released in 1968 was not Rosemary’s Baby or Night of the Living Dead or even 2001: A Space Odyssey. The major theatrical release that most bucked the conventions of the year 1968 almost certainly has to be...

Tik-Tok is a satirical science fiction novel published in 1983, written by renowned sci-fi author John Sladek. Sladek, who died in 2000, was known for his quirky and entertaining writing which has humor and cynicism in equal measure. Both are...

Though an author of myriad books and plays, William Goldman is perhaps best known for his tale-within-a-tale of love and loss, capture and rescue, action and adventure. The 1973 fantasy romance novel The Princess Bride was a smashing success when...

Hiroshima is a non-fiction book written by John Hersey and published by The New Yorker on August 31 in 1946, a year after the atomic bomb was dropped by the American Army in Hiroshima, Japan during World War II.

Hersey visited Japan from 1945-1946...

Originally, Ellen Raskin, the author of The Westing Game, entered college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the intention of majoring in journalism; however, after visiting the Chicago Art Institute and viewing an exhibition of...

The Silver Sword is a children's novel published in 1956 by British author Ian Serraillier. It is widely considered to be a classic of children’s literature.

Serraillier began the work in 1949, five years after World War II's end, and took five...

To understand Audre Lorde's poetry, one just has to be sincere. She's not writing anything incredibly profound, but she is writing the truth. Based on her own experiences, Lorde writes to dispel the lies which people tell themselves. She was a...

Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer born in New Delhi in 1961. In India, there was not a great deal of opportunity to break out as a writer, so he decided to pursue his bachelor’s degree at Pomona College in California. Afterward, he...

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a 1999 collection of short stories written by American author Nathan Englander. Englander is a writer who has published four books and won several prizes, international and local, for his excellent work. His...

David and Goliath is a non-fiction psychology book written by Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell. The book was first published on September 1, 2011. Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist born in England but lived most of his life and spent his university...

Free Love and Other Stories is an eclectic short story collection by British author Ali Smith. Published as Smith's first book in 1995, it won the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award.

Free Love and Other Stories contains 12 short stories,...

Weber’s text was first written in 1904 as a series of essays. It evolved into a more cohesive work over time, as Weber incorporated responses to criticism and reworked some of his ideas. The text centers itself on a discussion of the 16th century...

The Conversation is one of Francis Ford Coppola's lesser known films, but it is also considered one of his best. Released in 1974, during the middle of the Watergate scandal, its artful depiction of paranoia and fear in the face of improved...

"Desiree's Baby" is the most famous of Kate Chopin's many short stories. It is set before the American Civil War on two plantations in Louisiana: that of the Valmondés and of the Aubignys. The story is about a baby and racial tension between a...

Pretty Woman is considered one of the most iconic American romantic comedies. It is interpreted by many as a modern American retelling of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, in which a rich and successful benefactor plucks a naive girl from the wrong...