Newest Study Guides

Serving as the first female Makar - or National Poet of Scotland - from 2011 to 2016, Liz Lochhead's poetry is bold, adventurous and has a definite feminist streak that runs through it. Over the course of her successful career, she has adopted and...

Guantánamo Diary is the personal memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He was born in Mauritania, a country in the northwest of Africa, in 1970. Arrested in 2001 by the U.S. military, he was suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, the terrorist...

Journals are commenced for a number of reasons. Sometimes they are begun as diaries which offer a psychological trail into self-reflection and a more intuitive level of self-awareness. Other journals offer the opportunity to write down immediate...

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was a prominent poet, renowned for his distinctive linguistic approach that blended elements of French literature, Greek mythology, drama, and English poetry. He was heavily influenced by the works of Wallace Stevens and...

An Irish poet and perhaps the most representative of the modernist poets, W.B. Yeats has offered much to the English literary canon. He is known not only for is contributions to British but also Irish literature, and was an irreplaceable part of...

E. F. Benson was a British author who lived from 1867 to 1940. He may be most famous for his “Mapp and Lucia” series of novels as a result of the books having spawned two different and well-received BBC adaptations in 1985 and 2014. Benson was, in...

The Underdogs is a historical fiction novel written by the Mexican author Mariano Azuela. It was published in 1915 and is considered the classic novel of the Mexican Revolution. Azuela brilliantly reflects the events of the Mexican Revolution in a...

Born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1914, Octavio Paz was one of the most significant writers in the Spanish world of the 20th century, winning not only the Neustadt Prize but also the Nobel Prize for Literature in the course of an esteemed career....

Doris Lessing: Stories is a major compilation of the works of Doris Lessing, a British novelist and poet who was the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. She is also notable for being the oldest person to ever receive this honor.

This...

A canonical work that lifted the genre of critical engagement and analysis to nearly the same level as works of pure creativity, Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets was at one time known as The Lives of the English Poets and originally carried...

Robert Bringhurst’s “Blue Roofs of Japan: A Performance Text” is the poet’s first attempt at a polyphonic poem. Published in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music in 1986, “Blue Roofs of Japan” is fully intended to be a performance piece as the subtitle...

The Praise of Folly is one of the most important books of Renaissance Humanism and one of the most perfect expressions of the sentiments and philosophy of its author, Desiderius Erasmus. Its historical importance cannot be overestimated; the...

"Yellow Dog" is a novel written by British author Martin Amis, and published in 2003. The story revolves around the character of Xan Meo, a successful jazz musician whose life takes a dramatic turn when he is brutally assaulted by a group of...

With 25 published novels indulging in one of the favorite genres loved by readers in Victorian England—romantic fiction—Rhoda Broughton stands as one of the most popular and commercially successful writers most people today have never heard of. A...

Terry Gilliam's masterwork Brazil (1985), starring Jonathon Pryce and Robert De Niro, tells the story of a low-level bureaucrat named Sam Lowry (played by Pryce) and his attempt to escape the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring...

Chains was written by Laurie Halse Anderson, a New York Times bestselling author of children's literature. This historical fiction novel was published during 2008 by Atheneum. Furthermore, it is the first installment of her Seeds of America...

The Stories of John Cheever is a 1978 collection of one of the recognized masters of the short story form. Comprising his most famous and anthologized tales, the collection was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book...

Inducted into the Chicago Hall of Fame in 2014, Margaret Walker is one of those writers whom history ought to remember, but will probably relegate to the margins. A trailblazing black poet and writer, Walker was born in Alabama in 1915, a few...

Leif Enger wrote this best-selling novel in 2001. It is about the Land family’s journey to be reunited after a violent act forced them apart. The narrator, Reuben Land, is an 11 year old with severe asthma who perseveres through many difficulties....

Pat Barker penned Regeneration in 1991. The novel depicts the effects of World War I on the British officers and soldiers who are recovering at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. Set in 1917 and 1918, in the final years of the brutal...

Kent Nerburn is an American novelist born on July 3, 1946 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a child, he was taught by his father, Lloyd, to always exude compassion and kindness. Lloyd worked for the American Red Cross and Nerburn cites his experiences...

Black Hole was written by Seattle-born author Charles Burns. The story takes place during the mid-1970s in suburban Seattle. A number of teenagers encounter an unusual plague that's only transmitted through sexual contact. As if that is not...

The tale told in Jack London’s 1904 adventure romance novel The Sea-Wolf actually begins three years earlier on a foggy night in San Francisco Bay. It was on the last day of November in 1901 that two ferries played starring roles in the worst...

Hari Kunzru is a British novelist born in London in 1969. After his primary education at Bancroft’s School in Essex, he attended Wadham College to study English. He later obtained a degree in Philosophy and Literature from the University of...