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High Fidelity is a 1995 fiction novel by the English author Nick Hornby. It tells the story of Rob Fleming, an obsessive music fan who examines his top five worst break ups to understand his most recent heartbreak. The book was adapted into a musical, a television series, and 2000 film starring John Cusack and directly by Stephen Frears.Plot SummaryRob Fleming is the 35-year-old owner of a record store in London. When his girlfriend Laura... Read High Fidelity Summary

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford is a historical novel published in 2009. The story follows Henry Lee at two pivotal stages in his life—in 1942, when he is a 12-year-old with a crush on a Japanese girl, and in 1986, when he is recently widowed. The book, Ford’s debut novel, spent 130 weeks atop the New York Times Best-Seller List and won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature... Read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Summary

Mary Hood’s first collection of short stories, How Far She Went, was published in 1984 and won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review/Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award. This study guide refers to the University of Georgia Press edition published in 1984. Four stories in the collection first appeared in The Georgia Review: “A Country Girl,” “Doing This, Saying That, to Applause,” “Manly Conclusions,” and “Inexorable Progress.” The opening story... Read How Far She Went Summary

How I Learned to Drive, a play written by Paula Vogel, premiered Off-Broadway in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998. It addresses pedophilia, victim blaming, and misogyny, as well as the complexities of love and family. Through non-chronological flashbacks, Li’l Bit, now in her forties, uses learning to drive as a metaphor for her learning about sex, and about life, from her aunt’s husband, Peck, with whom she has a sexual relationship. Each scene is designated... Read How I Learned to Drive Summary

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If Beale Street Could Talk is a novel by James Baldwin (1924-1987), a critically acclaimed African American writer on matters of race and the African American experience. Originally published in 1974, the novel gained fresh attention with Barry Jenkins’ film adaptation in 2019. The novel is the love story of salesclerk Clementine “Tish” Rivers and budding sculptor Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt, African American natives of Harlem whose lives are derailed in the late 1960s to early... Read If Beale Street Could Talk Summary

If I Ever Get Out of Here (2013), by Eric Gansworth—a member of Onondaga Nation and Haudenosaunee—is a young adult, contemporary fiction novel about a teenage boy, Lewis “Shoe” Blake. Lewis narrates his struggles fitting into life in junior high and navigating the cultural differences between his life on the reservation, which he refers to as “the rez,” and that of his white classmates.Other work by this author includes Apple: Skin to the Core.Plot SummaryThe... Read If I Ever Get Out of Here Summary

If I Stay is set in a small, contemporary Oregon town outside Portland and chronicles 17-year-old Mia’s struggle with life and death after a horrible automobile accident kills her parents and younger brother, and leaves her, the only survivor, in a coma.The narrative structure moves back and forth in time between her comatose present and her formative years growing up in a quirky musical family, developing into a gifted and dedicated cellist, meeting her best... Read If I Stay Summary

Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addictions is an unconventional nonfiction book on how to treat addiction, how addicts can better assimilate into society, and how society can dispel many of the myths that surround addiction. Maté works as an addiction specialist at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. Much of the book, published in 2010, focuses on Maté’s evidence that childhood stressors increase the likelihood that one will become an... Read In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Summary

Into the Wild is a nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It was first published in 1996 and turned into a feature film directed by Sean Penn in 2007. It has been classified as outdoor writing, travel writing, and biography.In 1993 Krakauer published “Death of an Innocent” in Outside magazine, an article that detailed the death of Christopher McCandless. The article generated an enormous response from readers, and Krakauer spent a subsequent year tracing McCandless’s... Read Into The Wild Summary

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Part memoir, part exhortation for much-needed reform to the American criminal justice system, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a heartrending and inspirational call to arms written by the activist lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based organization responsible for freeing or reducing the sentences of scores of wrongfully convicted individuals. Stevenson’s memoir weaves together personal stories from his years as a lawyer with strong statements against racial and legal injustice, drawing a clear... Read Just Mercy 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

The Last Days of Summer is an epistolary novel written by Steve Kluger and published in 1998. The novel offers a view into the life of Joey Margolis, an articulate, resourceful, tender-hearted young Jewish baseball fan who resides in Brooklyn, New York during the 1940s. His parents’ divorce results in Joey’s estrangement from his father, who marries a Manhattan socialite and fails to maintain contact with his son, as well as relocation from the Hasidic... Read Last Days of Summer Summary

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Machinal, which means “mechanical” in French, is a play by Sophie Treadwell, and is based on the true story of a woman who murders her husband, after seven attempts; this woman, Ruth Snyder, is subsequently the very first female to be executed using the electric chair.The woman is convicted and executed for the murder.Machinal was first performed in London, in 1931, at the Royal National Theatre. Treadwell was a journalist and learned of the murder... Read Machinal Summary