Newest Study Guides

Clarice Lispector is a Brazilian author born on December 10, 1920 in Chechelnyk, Ukrainian People’s Republic. As a child, her home was war-torn and completely unsafe for her and her family. Thus, she moved to Rio de Janeiro by the time she was a...

Let the Circle be Unbroken is one of Mildred Taylor’s most famous books for young readers, and a cherished work of African American fiction. It is a sequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, which was published in 1976.

Let the Circle was published...

A Mad World, My Masters is a city comedy play written by Thomas Middleton. It was published in the early 1600s. Thomas Middleton was a British playwright and poet who was very famous at his time and his works were viewed by many people. He came...

Published in 1987, The Playmaker is a novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally. The book is based in 18th century Australia, in a British Penal colony. The convicts, bored and alone on the island, all work together to make a play to...

George Farquhar is an Irish writer born in Derry, Ireland in 1677. At a young age, Farquhar demonstrated a natural capacity for writing. At 7 years, he was writing short stories and always thinking up ideas for a new play. After graduating grade...

Jo Shapcott was born in London, England in 1954. She was educated at various institutions, including Trinity College in Dublin, Oxford, and Harvard. She won a National Poetry in 1985, before she had even released a poetry book. Her first book, ...

Coming Up for Air is a fictional classic novel written by George Orwell. It was first published in 1939. George Orwell was an English novelist and was very famous for his novels Animal Farm, which alluded to communism and its problems, and 1984, a...

Originally a Mexican film, The Young and the Damned is the English film translation for Los Olvidados. Released in 1950, the film was directed by Luis Buñuel, running just 80 minutes. Distributed by Koch-Lorber Films, the movie was heavily...

Cronos is Guillermo del Toro's first feature film. Released in 1993, It set him off as one the freshest directors to watch for as critically the film was praised, though it did not receive a wide American distribution (only 28 theaters). It was...

My Garden is a non-fiction book and somewhat a memoir written by author Jamaica Kincaid. It was published in 1999. Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer and gardener. She has written numerous books, and the most famous were My Garden and A Small...

Nikki Giovanni is considered a top African-American poet of the twentieth century. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee during 1943 and was raised in a family of strong African-American heritage. She gained popularity during the 1960s and...

If for no other reason, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land would hold a place in the history of literature as the first science fiction novel to ever make it onto the New York Times Bestseller List. Published at just the right time in...

Dombey and Son was initially published as "Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation." The novel is typically seen as marking a transition in Dickens's career. His seventh novel, it is notable for showing...

Published in 2011 to immense acclaim, The Tiger's Wife earned Tea Obreht forms of recognition that few writers will see in their lifetimes--let alone at the age of 25. Yet Obreht was exactly that old when her politically conscious, symbolically...

Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is a classic of Black feminist science fiction. Characterized by classic sci-fi conventions such as a post-apocalyptic earth, a character with strange psionic powers, and a belief that it is the destiny of...

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed letter to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to be a black person in America. It spans the personal, such as growing up in Baltimore and his cultivation of an intellectual and...

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a 1999 historical novel by Tracy Chevalier. The novel is inspired by the famous painting of the same name, which was painted by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The precise date of the painting is unknown, but it is...

Citizen: An American Lyric was published in 2014 by American poet Claudia Rankine, and remains a timely, even urgent meditation on race, violence, racism, art, and mediation. The book has been described as both criticism and poetry; critic Michael...

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a national best-seller and a global phenomenon. Chronicling Nafisi's time as a female professor of Western Literature at the University of Tehran in the 1970s, her expulsion from the...

The Lion and the Jewel is one of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s most famous works. While it is a light and amusing comedy, it is also renowned for its complex themes and allegorical structure; it is also notable for its insights into Yoruba...

Dead Poets Society is a 1989 movie starring Robin Williams and directed by Peter Weir. It is set in the ultra-conservative and highly prestigious Welton Academy, an aristocratic public school in the Northeastern United States, and tells the story...

C.S. Lewis is an author of children’s literature. He is most widely known for The Chronicles of Narnia series; he also has written scholarly books and fictional works about Christianity. The Chronicles of Narnia series consists of seven books in...

The Second Sex was published in 1949, at a time when feminism was not yet widely discussed as a pressing social issue. It is widely considered to be a formative text of second-wave feminism. This strain of feminism shifted focus from gaining...

The biggest grossing movie released in June 1974 was Chinatown. That very dark update of film noir featuring one of the most intricate plots in Hollywood grossed 23 million dollars, which was a good 12 million dollars less than the biggest...