Newest Study Guides

Turtle Island is Gary Snyder’s volume of thematically related verse which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974 and is considered by many the zenith of his career. After publishing half a dozen volumes that barely managed even to...

Wendy Cope is a British writer who is known primarily for her poems. Wendy Cope was born in England in 1945 and for an extended period of time she worked as a teacher. Wendy Cope began writing late in her life, having her first collection of...

The 18th century proved to be a revolutionary moment in the long history of the institution of marriage. In England, at any rate, some of the longstanding contractual and transactional conventions underwent a period of renegotiation in the public...

Howl's Moving Castle is a children's fantasy novel written in 1986 by renowned English fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of the return of the evil Witch of the Waste after fifty years of dormancy, and her threatening behavior...

American Gods is a novel written by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman in 2001. The story follows the protagonist, Shadow Moon, a man who is released from prison only to find himself in the midst of a war between the gods of old and the new gods of...

As the 18th century was slowly drawing to a close, Thomas and Elizabeth Homer Strickland welcomed their ninth child, Elizabeth. One might well say she was born to become a writer; five of her siblings pursued the same career path. Agnes had chosen...

A Cop's Life: True Stories from the Heart Behind the Badge is a collection of twenty short stories by Las Vegas Police Department Sergeant Randy Sutton, that detail the experiences' law enforcement officers go through in the line of duty. It was...

Published in 2011, Machine Man is Australian writer Max Barry’s fourth novel. The work began in March 2009 as a page a day entry five times a week posted to the author’s personal website. These weekly contributions combined with reader feedback...

Written by Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds is a poignant, realistic story of the complex dynamics of life on the battlefield. The book was critically acclaimed, winning many awards, including the 2013 Hemingway Foundation Award....

Under This Unbroken Sky is the debut novel of author Shandi Mitchell, telling the tragic, moving tale of a Ukrainian immigrant struggling to reconnect with his family and heal together after being separated from them for nearly two years. It was...

Regarded as a master of the short story, K. Saraswathi Amma was born in rural Malaya in 1919. Her upper-class family status afforded her the opportunity to receive a formal education, and in 1941 she received a Bachelor's Degree in the Mayalam...

District 9 is Neil Blomkamp's 2009 film that tells the story of an alien spacecraft that lands on Earth in the early 1980's. The aliens, however, have not arrived to destroy Earth or to render Earth's people aid; they have landed on Earth as...

March is a three-part graphic novel that tells the story of how Rep. John Lewis came to take part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march that eventually led to the Bloody Sunday confrontation between police and civil rights protesters. The series of...

Grace Ogot is a prominent Kenyan author. She is a pioneer female writer of short stories that cover the religious, social, economic, and cultural sphere of Kenya. Her stories are mainly set after Kenya acquired its independence or they are stories...

Although the title may sound uncannily appropriate to a children's book, in fact, The Brave Cowboy is very much a book for parents and other grown-up enamored with the mythology of the Old West. Abbey’s second novel reveals a considerable aptitude...

Kathleen Winter is a novelist and short story writer who was born in 1960 in the north of England. One of her most prominent works, Annabel, was published in 2010 and is regarded as a daring and pathbreaking novel.

This novel was published by...

Firebird is a memoir by American poet Mark Doty. The memoir takes place mostly in the 1960s and covers Doty's life from ages six to sixteen, which he spent in Tennessee, Arizona, and other parts of the American South.

Firebird has been regarded as...

Like so much of Augusta Webster’s life, her 1878 collection of essays originally published in the Examiner sports a title that is a combination of the dramatic and ironic. The year of publication gives away the fact that this is a work of the...

Published posthumously, Moments of Being is a fragmented and disjointed collection of autobiographical sketches that is curiously close to the fundamental spirit of Woolf's experiments in stream-of-consciousness fiction. One way of approaching...

The Fishermen is a 2015 novel by Chigozie Obioma, an American Nigerian writer who is currently working at the University of Michigan. The fictional book is set in his native hometown, Akure, Nigeria during the 1990's.

The Fishermen chronicles the...

The Young Musician is a novel written by Horatio Alger. Alger was an American author who lived in the 1800s. He wrote many, many works, over a hundred books, about how success can be attained through honesty, virtue, and hard work. Even though his...

The first place to begin with an introduction to the Diary of the Samuel Pepys often seems to be with that strange last name. While it does not really matter much to the lone reader traversing across England’s geographical and historical landscape...

A prodigious French poet of Christian and Lebanese descent, Andree Chedid was a writer who questioned humanity, individuality, and the interconnected ties that bond a person to the rest of the world. Her 1983 novel, From Sleep Unbound, is a work...

In 2002, one of the most influential dramatists of the second half of the 20th century returned with great controversy to the Broadway stage. The playwright was Edward Albee—writer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and the play was titled The...