Newest Study Guides

The Short Fiction of Chinua Achebe is a collection of short stories by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe published between 1953 and 1972. It is an essential read for anyone looking to receive great insight on the African people who to this day remain...

Spring Moon is the title of one of Bette Bao Lord’s works, which was published in 1981. The protagonist of this novel is Spring Moon, a spoiled and wealthy girl who lives in the House of Chang in ancient China. However, Spring Moon’s life of...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel written by Anne Bronte. Bronte used her pseudonym Acton Bell when she first published the book in 1848. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was Anne’s second (and last) novel, and even though it was extremely popular...

The Popol Vuh means "Book of the Community" or "Council Book" in the classical language of Quiche. It details the mythological histories and also a history of the rulers of the Mayan Kingdom, the ancient civilization of highland Guatemala and...

Charles Simic, born during 1938, is a well-respected American poet with an intuitive approach to creating remarkable poetry. He was born in Yugoslavia and emigrated to the United States as a teenager, according to the Poetry Foundation. He was an...

The Conjure Woman and Other Tales is really less a simple anthology of short stories than it is a novel in the form of a collection of loosely connected short stories. Charles Waddell Chesnutt is considered to be the singular greatest writer of...

A path breaking American psychological drama film, Girl, Interrupted (1999) is a movie that is loosely based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir with the same name. This film is about Susanna’s journey of self-discovery, after she is committed to the state...

Jonathan Swift, born in Ireland in 1667, was a writer, involved in politics and poet. He wrote for the Whigs and the Tories, along with other works such as A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, and A Modest Proposal; many of his works were done...

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, written by David Foster Wallace, is a short story collection consisting of more than twenty different stories. It was first published during 1999 and was later published during 2000 by Abacus. Some short stories...

Marianne Moore’s poetry is obsessed with mathematical perfection and formal precision. The precision of syllabic complexity results in internal rhymes and rhythms that drive the stanza formation rather than the typical reliance upon the rhymes...

Tokyo Story is a Japanese movie that was directed by Yasujiro Ozu. It was released in 1953 and eventually gained fame. Many critics said that this movie was Ozu’s masterpiece and is one of the greatest films of all time. In 2012, it was still...

The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the first novel by American-Vietnamese author Le Thi Diem Thuy. It was published by Knopf in 2003. Before being published as a novel of its own, it was published in The Best American Essays of 1997.

After it...

Edna St. Vincent Millay is the very definition of the poet as rebel. At least as much Shelley and maybe even more than Keats, Millay fully inhabits the role of the writer in society as the caretaker of its continued progression forward. She was a...

Jurassic Park is a science fiction novel written by Michael Crichton in 1990. Originally intended as a screenplay, Crichton began Jurassic Park in 1983 about a university student who recreates a dinosaur. Given the financial resources that would...

Colin Teevan’s How Many Miles to Basra? was originally commissioned as a radio drama by BBC3 and initially broadcast on July 11, 2004. The first stage performance of the play was produced in September 2006 by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds....

Jim Wallis is an American novelist, theologian, and political commentator born in Detroit, Michigan on June 4, 1948. As a teenager, he was heavily involved in local government, participating in Students for a Democratic Society as well as the...

Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939) is an author from Ghana. His contributions to literature include novels, essays, poetry, short stories, and even children's books. Primarily concerned with racism and prejudice, Armah's personal life becomes intertwined...

Marley and Me is an autobiographical novel written by John Grogan and published in 2005. The novel reveals of the narrator’s life within 13 years. During these years, he and his wife have been through a lot, but what is so distinctive of the...

Brideshead Revisited (The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder) was authored by Evelyn Waugh. It was first published during 1945 and was published again during 1982 by Back Bay Books. This novel delves into the life of Charles...

Out Stealing Horses (originally titled “Ut og stjæle hester”) is a novel written by Per Petterson in 2003. Originally written and published in Norwegian, it was translated into English in 2005 and published in the US in 2007. It follows the story...

Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet (born in Suva, Fiji) who created two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill which won the Somerset Maugham Award. Born on September 20, 1974, he has written several books, plays, and poems. He is known for...

In the height of the Cold War, a Polish author by the name of Stanislaw Lem (pronounced: stah-nis-wahv lem) was working feverishly publishing short science fiction works rapidly. He became something of a superstar in the realm of science fiction...

Solaris was first published in Warsaw, Poland in 1961 and was later translated from Polish into French and finally into English in 1970. This unique science fiction novel was written by Stanislaw Lem.

The protagonist Kris Kelvin is a psychologist...

Thanks to Bryan Cranston’s Oscar-nominated performance as Dalton Trumbo, the irreverent and iconoclastic figure of American letters is perhaps known best as the guy who used to type while sitting in a bathtub full of water. At least his name is...