Study guides - Page 14 | Just Great DataBase

“The Natural” is a novel about baseball and suddenly it is a novel about almost paranormal mystery. The author brilliantly merges so familiar and close-to-earth game with all the typical struggles and rivalry in the team with something much, much more subtle, that gives the book the fleur of Gothic mystery. The story tells us the biography of a young rising star of baseball that...

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is a simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking romantic story that has inspired lots of movie directors and given hope to countless people who don’t believe in lifelong love. The story is quite trivial: an old man reads to a lady in the nursing home. What he reads seems to be a diary of a romantic relationship: from the very first acquaintance through...

The symbol of a long return home, “The Odyssey” written by Homer, is a true literature classic. The story is as old as the world, no wonder that its authorship is widely questioned. One thing is for sure – the greatness of “The Odyssey” is due not to a single individual’s talents, but is a result of a whole century oral heritage and cultural tradition once put...

While “The Old Man and the Sea” closes Ernest Hemingway writing career, it also opens his talents from other perspectives and was one of the reasons for him being awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.  To put it in a nutshell, this short novel is about an old Cuban fisherman. Santiago didn’t have luck with fishing for many days. After eighty-four days of failure, he finally...

If you think that nothing new can be said about King Arthur, try this book by T. H. White. More than six thousand pages are dedicated to carefully dismantling everything you knew before about the King Arthur and his knights and rebuilding this knowledge in the new, unusual but brilliant shape. To fully understand the book, we should know the time when it was written - right after the World War...

Susan Eloine Hinton started writing early. At the age of fifteen she already had a first draft of “The Outsiders” and it took her another year and a half to send it to publishing. The book was intended to be read by her young counterparts and is now considered a great example of the adult fiction genre. “The Outsiders” vividly show how young generations give into social...

John Steinbeck wrote his book “The Pearl” in 1947. It is a story about family, dreams, and human greed. The writer managed to write a strong novel using very simple text. The protagonists of the story are Kino, the pearl diver, his wife Juana and their baby Coyotito. One day, when a scorpion bites the boy, the whole family and a couple of curious villagers take off to see the doctor...

Oscar Wilde is a well-known Irish writer who published only one novel during his life. That novel was “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. During his life Wilde was very famous for his plays, but the first publisher of his novel initially cut the text by 500 words due to his skepticism of its success. After a great deal of criticism the author revised the novel and added seven new parts...

Pilgrim Progress by John Bunyan is one of the most famous religious allegories in the Christian world. Once its popularity was second only to the Bible. The book is written in two parts, the first one was finished in 1678 and it took the author several years to finish the second part in 1684. The book is dedicated to the metaphorical journey of a person throughout their life. The symbolic...

The Plague by Albert Camus may be called a great-grandparent of an “apocalyptic log” genre. The main storyline is simple and horrifying: there is a plague outbreak in the city, soon the city is put to quarantine and all the communication with the rest of the world stops. The narrative style is often called similar to Kafka’s: the characters are shown facing something...

“The Poisonwood Bible” offers a different outlook on migration literature. Barbara Kingsolver talks about an American family who relocated to Africa. The text has made a powerful impact on the Western readers who often find themselves entrapped in the bubble of their smooth everyday life. The story takes place at the end of the 1950s. The protagonists are the Prince family: a father...

The Prelude by William Wordsworth is an epic autobiographical poem the author dedicated all his life to. What is interesting is that The Prelude was meant to be only the first part, the introduction of a philosophical trilogy of poems that reflects Woodsworth’s worldview. But, unfortunately, the poet passed away in his eighties, leaving only The Prelude completed. The literature critics...

Political influence and power games have always been at the center of literary inspiration sources. A famous Italian political expert, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a great treatise “The Prince” on the philosophy of politics that talks about this topic in innovative ways and unusual approaches. The book is divided into 26 chapters that each describe different state models, various types...

Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven” in 1845. It is cited and recognized for many reasons, including its style, melodically composed text and ambiance. Inside the book, there are many reflections of folk culture, religious symbols, Antique characters and classical plots.  At first, the reader finds himself in a middle of a dark room late at night. There’s a man who is...

“The Red Badge of Courage” is an American novel about the civil war written by Stephen Crane. Unlike many other war novels, this story focuses on the inner feelings of a member of the Union Army who at one point fled the battlefield. The book was written at the end of the 19th century by an author who was born after the actual events depicted. But the text strikes the reader with its...

“The Remains of the Day” is a novel of the British writer of Japanese origin, Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1989. “The Remains of the Day” is called the most English novel of the end of the 20th century. This novel is about the butler Stevens who has dedicated his life to the loyal service of Lord Darlington. But now the house in which he has been serving for many years...

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is a novel that received a very controversial feedback in the Victorian society. It is the story about the complicated relationships, love triangles that sometimes have nothing in common with love, but only with rationality. The desires and goals of the characters are rarely noble and some of them who are relatively “pure” are miserable during...

The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells is a realistic sentimental novel that is considered the classic of realistic writing until the present day. Howells portrayal of the love triangle between young Tom and the two Lapham daughters, smart Penelope and beautiful Irene, was often criticized for being plain and too mundane for the romantic story, but the critics almost always agreed at...

The Road is a dystopian post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, the bleak setting of which served as the inspiration to the lots of the movie directors, writers and game designers. The story of The Road is the story without hope and even the happy ending is just a bright spot that seems to fade soon with the rest of the light on the dying Earth. The novel tells us the story of the father and...

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter: A Romance” at the end of the 19th century when public morals were still strict and unforgiving. But the events of the novel are set in the 17th century when the Puritan society possessed full control over human choices.  The plot of the novel is centered about a lapse from the virtue of a young woman named Hester Prynne. She has to...