Newest Study Guides

Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial is about Josef K., a banker who is prosecuted by a court he has never heard of for a crime that is never revealed. Although K. attempts to fight the illogical accusation, the perplexing legal system steadily...

Russian author Leo Tolstoy's 1872 short story "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" is about a young merchant who is sent to a Siberian prison camp for a murder he didn't commit. After putting his faith in God, the merchant spends twenty-six years in...

The Four Feathers is the sixth novel of English author A.E.W. Mason and arguably his most successful composition. This masterpiece was published in 1902 by Macmillan as a historical fiction, thriller, and adventure book. The fact that its author...

New Grub Street is a realistic novel written by English novelist George Gissing, and published in three volumes by Smith, Elder & Co in 1891. The book is a semi-autobiographic work inspired by the authors’ own experiences in London’s literary...

Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese writer born on October 18, 1952, in Hanoi. He served as a soldier in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam War, and he came back home as one of only ten survivors in his unit of five hundred. The war had an...

In 2008, on the 23rd of May, at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, the film Synecdoche, New York was released for the first time. Directed by Charlie Kaufman, which was his debut film, the film Synecdoche, New York tells an unusual story about a...

The Boat is a collection of short stories heavily influenced by the author’s background and childhood experiences. Born in Vietnam, Nam Le fled to Australia with his parents while still a baby. The family was one of the many families of “boat...

A Little Life was written by Hanya Yanagihara and was published in March 2015 by Doubleday. A Little Life is Yanagihara's second novel, and due to the difficult subject matter, neither the author nor editor predicted that the novel would be...

The Color of Magic, the first of Sir Terry Pratchett's extensive comedic fantasy series Discworld, marked a humble beginning for what would become a massively successful endeavor. Set in the fictional realm of the Discworld, a flat circle carried...

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" is the last short story Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote before his death in 1881. Published in 1877 in A Writers' Diary, this story departs from the author's traditionally harsh realism, instead presenting...

“The Fly” was published in the The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922. At the time, Mansfield was grieving over the loss of her brother, who died in a military training accident shortly before he was to be deployed to France at the start of World War I....

Frank Bidart’s collection of poems from 1965 to 2016, published in 2017 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The collection was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2017. Bidart also won...

If there is a required job history for a poet, it is quite likely that Texan-born Jonah Winter can meet it, having worked as a llama rancher (among other stints) before embarking on his career as a writer of poetry. Winter was initially drawn to...

John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill, a legal thriller, in 1989 while he was a practicing lawyer in Mississippi. While observing a trial in the courthouse near his practice, he witnessed the testimony of a 12-year-old who was raped and beaten, and...

The Rez Sisters is a play by Canadian playwright Tomson Highway. First performed in 1986, the play is centered on seven Native women who live on a fictional reserve called Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. It is the...

Down Second Avenue is a semi-autobiographical memoir by novelist, teacher, and writer Ezekiel Es’kia Mphahlele. It was released in South Africa by Peter Smith Publishers in 1959. Es’kia was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1969 and is highly...

The Ecstasy of Influence is Jonathan Lethem's fifth book since his first breakthrough The Fortress of Solitude in the year 2003 which ranked as a bestseller. The book was later followed by several works such as Men and Cartoon an imaginary...

Tom McCarthy's Spotlight (released in 2015) tells the story of eponymous "Spotlight" team from the Boston Globe, who were tasked with investigating the plague of child abuse cases in the Boston area - and more broadly, across the world -...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, written by J.K. Rowling. In this book, Harry struggles under the heavy responsibility to face the evil Lord Voldemort and save the people he loves most. It is...

Etheridge Knight is an African-American poet born in Mississippi. His serious involvement with poetry came after his imprisonment which was a result of a drug addiction which was a relief from pain because of an injury he received while serving in...

Fire on the Mountain is a 1977 novel by Anita Desai that deals with the subjects of solitude, existentialism, and oppression of females in patriarchal Indian society. The book tells the story of Nanda Kaul, a widowed, reclusive woman who has to...

The Water Dancer is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel. It debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2019. Coates has said that he worked on the novel for a decade in “various...

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a collection of theoretical texts, memoir, and poetry, first published in 1987. Since then, it has become not just Anzaldúa’s most famous work, but a foundational text in Chicana/o, gay...

The first in a five-book series by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley presents sociopathic murderer Tom Ripley and the first of his criminal exploits centering around Italy and the carefree, rich scion Dickie Greenleaf. The novel became...