Newest Study Guides

Adapted from the James Baldwin novel of the same name, If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) is writer-director Barry Jenkins follow-up to the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight (2016). Set against the backdrop of early 1970's Harlem, New York, ...

Hamlet is director-writer-actor Kenneth Branagh's adaption of William Shakespeare's famed play of the same name. Branagh is perhaps best-known for his Shakespeare adaptions, so his involvement in the adaption of Hamlet is no surprise. Branagh's...

Born in November 1921, author Yoshiko Uchida certainly had an interesting life. During her senior year at U.C. Berkeley, Uchida was informed that she and her family -- as well as all of the Japanese Americans in the United States -- would be...

Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God was published in 1964. This is Achebe’s third novel after his books No Longer At Ease and Things Fall Apart. Together these three books are often referred to as the African Trilogy. This book was published as...

John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" is a long-form poem published in 1687, in celebration of a religious holiday commemorating St. Cecilia, a Catholic martyr and patron saint of music and musicians. Dryden, in this poem, celebrates music...

Everyman is a retrospective reflective novel about “everyman”. It is written by Philip Roth and was published in 2006 by Hougton Mifflin at 182 pages. There is an audiobook read by George Guidall which was published shortly after the written...

Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (released in 1994) is an undoubtedly interesting film. It was now-famous director Quentin Tarantino that came up with the story for the film, which revolves around two people who suffered through bad and...

Although written as a novel, The Moon Is Down was originally intended to be a play, and was written in such a way that it was easily adapted for the stage. Written in 1942, the novel is set in an unspecified small country in Northern Europe that...

Veronica Roth's novel Divergent was adapted for the big screen in 2014. It is a dystopian science fiction film on one hand but is also an action thriller, too. It is the first in the Divergent Series and is sent in a post-apocalyptic Chicago,...

Based on Dracula by Bram Stoker and the film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) follows Count Dracula as he moves from Transylvania to Wismar. On his journey, Dracula spreads the Black Plague across...

In all of the books you have read about the devil, you have probably never imagined him to be gainfully employed as a professor, engaged in debate with a monk called Michael or spending his down time philosophizing about rationalism, religion and...

Family is the story of slavery as told through the eyes and experiences of one family i particular. Clora is a slave; the story tells how her blood runs from its African roots all the way around the world and mixing with other races, classes and...

An Unquiet Mind is a memoir written in 2009 by Dr. Kay Jamison, in which she recounts her lifelong struggle with manic-depressive illness. The tone of An Unquiet Mind varies between one of informal recollection of life events and one of a clinical...

Everything I Never Told You is the debut novel from Chinese-American author, Celeste Ng. The story begins with the drowning of Lydia Lee, a Chinese-American girl growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1970s. As the local police investigate the...

Hag-Seed is a 2016 novel by the prolific novelist Margaret Atwood and is the seventh book in Hogarth's "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. Like the other novels of the series, it is a standalone retelling of one of Shakespeare's classics.

In Hag-Seed, ...

The Book of Mrs Noah is a novel by French-English author Michele Roberts. It is the story of a woman who visits Venice and begins to imagine that she is Noah's wife. The trip becomes less of a vacation and more of a journey of self-exploration and...

Steve Kowit was born June 30, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. Kowit is best known for his lively poetry. On his website, he jokes about the boredom of poetry readings and claims that his are "lively, entertaining, and passionate".

Over the course of...

The phrase "los vendidos" has two meanings when translated into English; "the sold ones", and "the sellouts". Neither translation speaks highly of the central characters in this one-act play by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez; the play takes a...

Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874. The fourth of Thomas Hardy’s novels, it marked a turning point in his career as his first major success; it was the second novel which he published under his own name (his first two...

Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 surrealist silent short film directed by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and co-written by Buñuel and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. Despite its brevity—at its original frame rate, it runs just over sixteen...

Released in 2006, Babel is an ensemble film written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is a complex non-linear drama that is the last in Iñárritu's "Death Trilogy" which includes Amores Perros and 21 Grams. It...

Much like many of von Trier's films, Melancholia (2011) is an exceedingly bizarre and unique film. The film follows two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively) who have a strained relationship. However, once...

Despite the fact that Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” is one of the author's more anthologized works, not many readers are aware that this is actually a sequel to a previous story writtin in 1892 called "At the 'Cadian Ball." The central characters...

Proof is a play by American playwright David Auburn. After a development process at George Street Playhouse, the play premiered in 2000 Off Broadway, then transferred to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre a few months later. It was directed by...