Newest Study Guides

Deepa Mehta's Earth (released in September 1999), is set in 1947 during the partition of India. It is a romance film and tells the story of a young girl with Polio named Lenny. Lenny is from a wealthy Parsi family who wants to remain neutral in...

The Slave Ship: A Human History is a book written by American author, scholar, professor and historian Marcus Rediker. It was first published in October 2007 by Penguin Books in the United States, and December 2007 by Viking books in the United...

So Long a Letter is a semi-autobiographical novel written in letter format by Mariama Bâ. It is a staple of classic women's literature classes, and also won the Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa in 1980.

The novel centers around the theme of...

Dirty Pretty Things is a 2002 film directed by Stephen Frears and written by Steven Knight about an illegal Nigerian immigrant and doctor, Okwe, who gets embroiled in a London underground organ market being run out of the hotel that employs him....

I Capture the Castle is author Dodie Smith's first novel. Published shortly after World War II in 1948 (the book was written while Smith and her husband were in California during the war), I Capture the Castle follows a young 17-year-old girl...

Scottish novelist Ali Smith received a multitude of plaudits for her 2014 novel How to Be Both, with critical acclaim and a slew of awards and nominations, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize, for which she was nominated in 2014, and the...

Three Women is a nonfictional biographical text written by the American writer and journalist Lisa Taddeo. It was published the 9th of July 2019 by Avid Reader Press and Simon Schuster. The story spans over 320 pages, featuring three different...

Sanditon is unique among Jane Austen's novels in that it was never actually finished; it is therefore up to the reader to decide what might ultimately happen to the characters they have come to know within it, and to try to create the novel's...

Room was published in 2010 by Emma Donoghue. It was shortlisted for many awards, including the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Awards in 2010; it was also The New York Times Notable Best Book of the Year, an ALA Notable Book, the Irish...

Me Before You was written by Jojo Moyes in 2012 and was published by Pamela Dorman Books/Viking Publishing. It has sold over 8 million copies and was adapted into a film in 2016. Jojo Moyes, author of the novel, wrote the screenplay for the film...

Sappho was a Grecian singer who performed more than 2,500 years ago. None of her music survives. Of the nine volumes of her poetry that once sat in the library of Alexandria, only two full poems, and a few hundred fragments, remain. Along with her...

The Great Escape was based upon a book written by Australian World War II veteran Paul Brickhill; his first-person account told of his experiences as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III, a prison camp in Poland where the Germans kept British and...

Though he is mostly known for his children's fiction, Roald Dahl was also a prolific writer of adult short stories, poetry, screenplays, and memoirs. In fact, Dahl first gained acclaim as an adult short-story writer, and "The Landlady" and Other...

First published in June 1977 by Del Rey Books, Anne McCaffrey's Get Off the Unicorn was met with rapturous critical acclaim. McCaffrey's biographer summed up the importance of the book nicely, writing that "the power and appeal of [her] reputation...

The Secret Garden is a children's novel by British writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. The story centers around a little girl named Mary Lennox who was born in India to wealthy parents. Mary's life in India suddenly comes to...

The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit poem describing the mythical Kurukshetra War between two sets of brothers descended from the king Bharata: the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is considered so historically important to the Hindu tradition that...

One of the most notable things about Sean Baker's 2017 movie is that it was the first film for many of its stars, including Brooklyn Prince, whose prior screen experience had been on a Chuck-E-Cheese commercial, and Bria Vinaite, who was spotted...

The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a comedy of manners in five acts that premiered at Covent Garden Theatre in 1775. It is considered one of Sheridan's best-known works and in addition to receiving many revivals, it has served as an...

Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (originally published in Sweden in 2013 ad in the United States as a translated version in 2015) tells the story of a young girl named Elsa. She lives in Sweden and knows she is...

City of God is a collection of short stories and poems by Gil Cuadros, an author who battles the disease AIDS himself and who uses his writing to de-sensationalize the homosexual identity and people struggling with AIDS.

The title of the...

Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs first premiered on December 10th, 1982 in a Pre-Broadway showcase. It is the first in Simon's so-called Eugene Trilogy (which consists of this play, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound). Brighton Beach Memoirs is...

Ursula Le Guin's science fiction novella, The Word for World is Forest, has the unusual distinction of having been published for the first time twice; the first time it appeared was in 1972, in an anthology of similar writings entitled Again,...

There are two types of Japanese poetry. The first, composed by classical poets, is actually written in the Chinese language. The second, Waka, is a traditional poetry written in the Japanese language; it is the latter that Ueda Akinari is most...

Although he was perhaps best-known as the best friend of famed Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkein, Christopher Wiseman was a very fine author and poet in his own right. Born in England just prior to the outbreak of WWII, Wiseman moved around...