Written in a style that evokes the oral tradition of storytelling, The Famished Road, by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, follows the peripatetic adventures of Azaro, a young boy who is finding his way amid the poverty and political passions of a newly independent nation. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991, the novel presents an allegorical tale of both the pitfalls and the promise latent in the post-colonial moment. Nigeria was one of the... Read The Famished Road Summary

In The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), Lauren Markham tells the true story of 17-year-old Salvadoran twins, Ernesto and Raúl Flores, who flee violence in El Salvador to build new lives for themselves in America. It follows the twins from their initial exodus from El Salvador, across the Rio Grande, and into the United States, where a world of both unbounded possibility and undeniable danger await... Read The Far Away Brothers Summary

“The Fat Girl” is a short story by Andre Dubus II that was originally published in his 1977 collection Adultery and Other Choices. Dubus was an American writer of short stories and essays from Louisiana. “The Fat Girl” chronicles nearly two decades in protagonist Louise’s life, spanning childhood to motherhood. The story explores Louise’s issues with body image, food and dieting, secrecy, gender roles, and relationships.This guide is based on the version of the text... Read The Fat Girl Summary

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The Fighting Ground, a novel by children’s writer Avi, tells the story of a 13-year-old boy who runs away from home to join the American Revolution. The book gives a minute-by-minute account of one day in the boy’s life and the hard lessons he learns about war. First published in 1984, the novel won several honors, including the Scott O’Dell Award, but it was also challenged or banned in some school districts for its use... Read The Fighting Ground Summary

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The Flamethrowers is a historical fiction novel published in 2013 by the American author Rachel Kushner. It follows the story of Reno, a young woman experiencing the turbulence of the 1970s in New York City. An aspiring artist, Reno finds herself in remarkable situations both in New York and abroad in Italy. Kushner weaves Italian and American history to highlight how people experience the implications of the societies and histories they inherit. Kushner subverts typical... Read The Flamethrowers Summary

“The Flowers,” a short story by Alice Walker, considers the impact of the Jim Crow South on a young Black girl’s emotional development and social awareness. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983—along with a National Book Award—for her critically acclaimed work The Color Purple (1982). Her experience growing up poor in the segregated sharecropping community of Eatonton, Georgia, as well as her advocacy as a Womanist activist, inform the personal and social... Read The Flowers Summary

Carrie Ryan’s young adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) uses a literary voice to blend elements of several different genres, including horror, romance, and dystopian fiction. The story follows Mary, a teenage girl growing up in the aftermath of a world ravaged by hordes of the undead. As she struggles to defy her community’s rigid rules, she must also confront existential challenges like love, loss, and the constant threat of death at... Read The Forest of Hands and Teeth Summary

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The Fourth Stall is a 2011 contemporary realistic middle grade novel by Chris Rylander. With the help of his best friend and business manager Vince, sixth grader Mac runs a secret business as a “fixer” in his elementary school: He solves problems and provides services for fellow students—for a price. When Mac takes on a customer requiring protection from Staples, a legendary local criminal, he must decide the best way to deal with Staples’s harmful... Read The Fourth Stall Summary

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The Game of Silence is work of middle-grade historical fiction by contemporary American author Louise Erdrich. Published in 2005, it is the second novel in Erdrich’s Birchbark House series. The first novel in this series, The Birchbark House (1999), is set in 1847 and introduces Omakayas and her family. The Birchbark House was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award. With The Game of Silence, Erdrich continues the saga of Omakayas’s family, and this... Read The Game of Silence Summary

Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” was published in her 1922 short story collection The Garden Party and Other Stories, and many critics consider it the best example of her renowned prose style. Like many Modernists, Mansfield was most interested in rendering not objective realities but characters’ subjective perspectives; her third-person narrators often have intimate insight into a character’s interior world, to the extent that the narrative voice embodies elements of that character’s psychology. The world... Read The Garden Party Summary

The Ghost Bride (2013) is the first novel by Malaysian Chinese author Yangsze Choo. The novel bridges multiple genres, including mystery, ghost story, and coming-of-age romance to explore the rich and complicated world of colonial Malacca at the end of the 19th century, the relationship between life and death, and how the afterlife can contain just as many complexities as the living world. Widely praised, the novel was adapted into a Netflix original series in... Read The Ghost Bride Summary