Newest Study Guides

Boogie Nights was released in 1997. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it went on to be nominated for three Oscars: Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor. The film chronicles the story of Eddie...

Magnolia was released in 1999. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Produced by Anderson along with JoAnne Sellar. The film would earn Tom Cruise a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards, and a win for Best Supporting...

Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed The Master which was released in 2012 starring Joaquin Phoenis, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. It was made for an estimated budget of $32 million, and garnered three Academy Award nominations for Best...

Standing Again at Sinai is a scholarly account of feminism and Judaism. It was written by Judith Plaskow and was published on February 1, 1991. Plaskow is an American author, feminist and Jewish woman. She is a Professor of Religious Studies at...

The Coming of Lilith is a collection of essays regarding feminism, judaism, and sexual ethics written by author Judith Plaskow. There are several collections of essays contained in the book that try to cover what she is trying to explain, and the...

Released in early 1962, Jules and Jim is one of the landmark films that defines the French New Wave of the late 50’s/early 60’s directed by perhaps its most iconic figure, Francois Truffaut. The title characters are the Austrian and French men who...

Babette's Feast and Other Short Stories is a fiction collection written by Danish author Karen Blixen. It was published on June 1, 1993. Karen Blixen also has the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, which is often used by her in her books. Blixen is known for...

Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie" in the original German) is a cornerstone of existentialist writing which centers on themes of religion, colonialism, and torture. It is notable for its flat, unaffected tone, with a...

One of the most chilling moments in modern cinema comes when Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), genius psychiatrist, player of mind games, serial killer and cannibal tells Clarice Starling that he enjoyed eating the liver of one of his last...

Storyteller is a unique book in that it is not a straight novel or a collection of the same kind of 'shorts'. Instead, this book written by Leslie Marmon Silko and published in 1981 by Arcade Publishing is a collection of poems, short stories, and...

Simon Ortiz is an Acoma Pueblo Indian who was born (1941) and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a renowned poet, short fiction writer, non-fiction writer, and orator. His admiration for language started at a young age when he was introduced...

Pump Six and Other Stories is Paolo Bacigalupi's debut collection of science-fiction short stories. Published in 2010 by Skyhorse Publishing, it includes eleven original short stories.

The eleven stories in Pump Six and Other Stories are...

The Great Santini is Pat Conroy’s third book and his first novel, a follow-up to his well-received memoir of teaching poor black children on Yamacraw Island. Adapted into critically acclaimed retitled Conrack after the way the kids pronounced his...

First appearing in The Graphic magazine, She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard, an English author also notable for his adventure stories (including King Solomon's Mines). The story centers around a duo and their encounters...

The American political tradition has a long history, and it can be traced back to the colonial era. The colonial period was the time when America was first established as a colony of Great Britain. It is also where British law, culture, and...

Weeds and Wild Flowers is a collection of poems written by Alice Oswald and Jessica Greenman. It was published in 2009. The poems are written by Oswald and illustrated by Greenman. Oswald is an English poet whose work is very famous and is known...

Originally written in Portuguese, The Zahir is a 2005 novel by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho. Since its publication, it has been translated into over 40 languages, becoming a global phenomenon.

The Zahir is a novel about a pilgrimage, or a holy...

Gang Leader for a Day is an autobiography written by Sudhir Venkatesh, about the urban poor life in Chicago. As explained in the beginning of the book, Venkatesh graduated from the University of Chicago and landed a research job, to learn about...

Exiles is a written play by James Joyce that includes three acts; the manuscript was written in 1914, finished in 1915, and published in 1918. Despite the efforts made by Joyce and American poet and critic Ezra Pound, to whom Joyce had shown the...

Carl Sandburg was a renowned and celebrated American poet. He was born in 1878 to Swedish parents in Illinois. At the age of 13, he left formal schooling to help support his family, working as a milkman, a porter and a bricklayer. He later moved...

Published in 1918, Eminent Victorians is a collection of four biographies of prominent heroes at the time of the author, Lytton Strachey. The biographies include those of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon,...

Democracy in America, is a firsthand sociopolitical observation of the United States written by French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. The author documents his travels through America and contrasts his experiences with established...

Published in 2000, The Danish Girl is an American novel by author David Ebershoff. A novel of realistic fiction, the main character becomes one of the first people to go through sexual reassignment surgery, a surgical transformation for someone to...

Published in 1936, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of the earlier novels of the famous writer and activist, George Orwell. Gordon Comstock is the main character in the novel, and his main goal is to defy the main things that society is doing -...