Fate

Hero and Leander is an epyllion (brief epic) by 16th-century English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. It can also be described as a mythological-erotic poem, one of a number of such poems that were published in England around this time, including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The poem is based on the ancient Greek story of two tragic lovers. The exact date of composition is not known but the poem was published in 1598, five years... Read Hero and Leander Summary

Hippolytus is a tragedy by Euripides, originally produced in Athens at the City Dionysia of 428 BCE. The tetralogy to which Hippolytus belonged earned Euripides the first prize that year. According to ancient authorities, this was Euripides’s second attempt at a play on the myth of Hippolytus, his earlier play having apparently horrified contemporary Athenians with its allegedly sensational depiction of Phaedra. Euripides’s original Hippolytus no longer survives, but the revised play quickly came to... Read Hippolytus Summary

Herodotus, “the Father of History,” researched and wrote the Histories in the middle of the 5th century BCE. Composed in the Ionic dialect of ancient Greek, this expansive account of the Greco-Persian war that occurred during the first two decades of the 5th century is the first prose masterpiece in European literature. The work traces the conflict between the Greek city-states and the Persian empire from its origins in the conquest of the Hellenic settlements... Read Histories Summary

Louis Sachar’s 1998 children’s mystery novel, Holes, tells the story of Stanley Yelnats, a 14-year-old boy accused of stealing a pair of shoes. A judge sentences him to 18 months in a camp, where a tyrannical warden has the boys digging five-foot by five-foot holes that appear random. However, their activity hints at the town’s complicated past and an outlaw’s lost treasure. The novel was awarded the 1998 National Book Award and the 1999 Newbery... Read Holes Summary

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Published in 2016, Hour of the Bees is a young adult magical realism novel by Lindsay Eagar. Set in contemporary New Mexico, the story follows 12-year-old Carol as she spends the summer on her grandfather’s sheep ranch, helping her family prepare it for sale and helping care for her grandfather, who has dementia. However, her grandfather’s stories of the land’s magic and history cause her to fall in love with it. Hour of the Bees... Read Hour of the Bees Summary

Housekeeping (1980) is a novel by Marilynne Robinson that follows the upbringing of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille Stone, in Fingerbone, Idaho, in the 1950s. This is the first novel by Marilynne Robinson. It was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, an award the author later won for her novel Gilead (2004). Beyond Housekeeping, Robinson is most known for Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping, which has been named... Read Housekeeping Summary

The novel House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday, was first published in 1968. Heralded as a major landmark in the emergence of Indigenous American literature, the novel won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. House Made of Dawn blends fictional and nonfictional elements to depict life on an Indigenous American reservation like the one where Momaday grew up.This guide uses an eBook version of the 2018 First Harper Perennial Modern Classics (50th Anniversary)... Read House Made of Dawn Summary

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Published in 2011, I Let You Go is Clare Mackintosh’s debut novel. In 2016 it won Theakson’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. That same year, the French translation won Best International Novel at the Cognac Festival Prix du Polar Awards. In 2017, publisher Little, Brown said it had sold more than one million copies. Mackintosh spent 12 years in the police force before becoming a writer. She has said that a real-life... Read I Let You Go Summary

I’ll Give You the Sun (2015) is an award-winning novel penned by Jandy Nelson about relationships, art, and destiny. It follows the story of twins Noah and Jude Sweetwine who once shared a close relationship but find themselves barely speaking to each other two years after their mother’s death.Jandy Nelson is an American author who writes young adult fiction. I’ll Give You the Sun is her second novel, which won numerous awards and honors, including... Read I'll Give You the Sun Summary

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Published in 1983, Ironweed is the third entry in William Kennedy’s cycle of historical fiction set in Albany, New York; it garnered critical acclaim and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel details a few days in the life of Francis Phelan, a drifter long estranged from his family, upon his return to Albany in 1938, taking his story as a chance... Read Ironweed Summary

July’s People, a 1981 dystopian novel by South African author Nadine Gordimer, imagines the aftermath of a bloody uprising that topples South Africa’s notorious, white-ruled apartheid regime. Her novel, which follows a white family’s desperate flight from Johannesburg, traces the complex interdependencies of white and Black South Africans, revealing the insidiousness of the regime’s racial disparities and mindsets, even among liberal, well-meaning white people. Through the lens of this hypothetical future, Gordimer’s novel explores racial... Read July's People Summary

A coming-of-age story that raises many questions about concepts such as good and evil, reality, time, and memory, Kafka on the Shore describes the journey of a fifteen year-old run-away, Kafka Tamura, from his home in Tokyo to the shores of Takamatsu. Kafka flees home because his father, a famous—but violent—sculptor, cursed him: he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. Kafka’s mother fled with his older sister when Kafka was... Read Kafka on the Shore Summary

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