Full Book Talk Slides (Standard and Honors authors)

2. 
Choose what interests you!
 Read who and what
interests you!
 Talk to your teacher for
advice, guidance, and
suggestions.
 Pace your self and
focus on time
management!.
 REMEMBER: No one
has ever died from the
Junior Term Paper. It is
just a paper.
Harpeth Hall
Junior

3. Margaret Atwood
Canadian novelist whose novels focus on political
themes such as feminism, censorship, and human rights.
Set in the near future, America has become a
puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her
story as a Handmaid under the new social
order. The society attempts to correct a
declining birthrate by delegating fertile
women to be the breeders of society.
Additional Atwood
Books: The Edible
Woman, the Robber
Bride, The Cat’s Eye,
etc…

4. Jane Austen
Born in 1775, the daughter of a rector, Austen was “an
English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set
among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the
most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism,
biting irony and social commentary have gained her
historical importance among scholars and critics "Criticism, 1870–
1940", The Jane Austen Companion, 102.
This is the most serious of Jane Austen’s
novels. Fanny Price, is a modest and
poor cousin cared for by the Bertram
family at their country estate.
Fanny's moral strength eventually wins
her complete acceptance by the family.

5. 
James Baldwin
 James Baldwin was an American
novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and
social critic. His essays, as collected in
Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet
unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual,
and class distinctions in Western
societies, most notably in mid-20th-
century America, and their inevitable if
unnamable tensions. Some Baldwin
essays are book-length, for instance “The
Fire Next Time”, “No Name in the
Street”, and “The Devil Finds Work”.
 Baldwin's novels and plays
fictionalize fundamental personal
questions and dilemmas amid
complex social and psychological
pressures thwarting the equitable
integration of not only blacks, but also
of gay and bisexual men, while
depicting some internalized obstacles
to such individuals' quests for
acceptance. Such dynamics are
prominent in Baldwin's second novel,
written well before gay equality was
widely espoused in America:
Giovanni's Room. However, Baldwin's
first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain,
is said to be his best-known work.

6. 
J. G. Ballard
 Surrealism, science fiction, the
fascination with the awful.
 The death and destruction of
the human spirit.
 J. G. Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai, China
on November 15, 1930. While a child during World War II,
he spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. This
experience was the basis for the emotionally moving novel
Empire of the Sun, which he adapted into a successful movie,
directed by Steven Spielberg. Before becoming a full-time
writer, he studied medicine at Cambridge University and
served as a pilot in the British Royal Air Force.
 Ballard is best known for his science fiction writings. His
early works were heavily influenced by surrealism. Most of
his novels deal with death and destruction of the human
spirit. Novels such as Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise
portray a society that is devolving into barbaric chaos. The
Drowned World describes an apocalyptic society, with a
hero that ushers in the destruction of the world. His novel
Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and
awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for fiction.

7. 
Anthony Burgess
Published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novella.
Set in a not-so-distant future English society that has a
culture of extreme youth violence, the novel's teenage
protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his
experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him.[1]
When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem"
him—the novel asks, "At what cost?". The book is partially
written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat".
According to Burgess it was a jeu d'esprit written in just three
weeks. (wikipedia)

8. Joseph Conrad
Polish born English novelist and short story writer who
is noted for the richness of his prose and his renderings
of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. His initial
reputation as a masterful teller of colorful adventures of
the sea grew as his deeply pessimistic vision of the
complexity of the human struggle was revealed.
This novella was first published in 1902.
The story reflects the physical and
psychological shock Conrad himself
experienced in 1890, when he worked
briefly in the Belgian Congo.

9. Dickens was an English novelist and was considered
to be the greatest of the Victorian period. His works
include attacks on social evils and inadequate
institutions.
Charles Dickens
Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for
eighteen years while he languished in Paris’s most feared
prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes’s
fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of
two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute
lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence,
revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out
against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the
French Revolution.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”

10. George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans was a Victorian novelist and
became one of the free-thinkers of the day. She
developed the method of psychological analysis
present in modern-day fiction.
Silas Marner is the story of a poor
weaver who is unjustly accused and
becomes bitter and miserly until he
is transformed by the love of an
abandoned baby girl.

11. 
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s,
Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the
young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish
American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A
brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his
marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to
Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle
not his own, and whose growing strength
highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound
study of the romantic concept of character; It is
lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.
Short stories: “Babylon Revisited” and “Winter
Dreams”.
One Novel & One Short Story

12. E. M. Forster
Forster was a British novelist and essayist. His
novels showed strong social comment based on
observation of middle class life. Maurice, a novel
about a homosexual relationship, was not published
until after his death in 1971.

13. John Fowles
John Fowles was born in London in 1926. His fiction
is rich in narrative suspense, romantic drama, and
erotic conflict.
In this contemporary, Victorian-style novel Charles
Smithson, a nineteenth-century gentleman with
glimmerings of twentieth-century perceptions, falls
in love with enigmatic Sarah Woodruff, who has
been jilted by a French lover.
From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century
novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to
the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, Fowles’
book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian
England.

14. The Magus is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman
who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island.
There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a
deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately
manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his
very survival.

15. Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell was a British novelist and short story
writer and was born in 1810. She was concerned about
issues affecting the poor as well as separate standards of
morality for men and women.

16. Nadine Gordimer
South African novelist and short story writer whose
major themes are exile and alienation. Her fiction
records the negative effects of apartheid. She
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

17. English novelist, short story writer, playwright, and
journalist whose novels treat life's moral ambiguities in
the context of contemporary political settings.
Graham Greene
End of the Affair is set in wartime
London. Maurice, a novelist, is having
affair with Sarah, a married woman.
When a bomb explodes, she fears that
he is killed and she promises God that
she will end the affair if he survives.
Originally published in 1948, The
Heart of the Matter is the
unforgettable portrait of one man—
flawed yet heroic, destroyed and
redeemed by a terrible conflict of
passion and faith.

18. Thomas Hardy
Hardy was an English poet and was his nation's foremost
regional novelist . His most impressive novels are set in
Wessex, an imaginary county in southwestern England
that were based on the actual county of Dorset.
The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth
published novel. It first appeared in the
magazine Belgravia, a publication known for its
sensationalism, and was presented in twelve
monthly installments from January to
December 1878.
Because of the novel's controversial themes,
Hardy had some difficulty finding a publisher;
reviews, however, though somewhat mixed,
were generally positive.
In the twentieth century, The Return of the
Native became one of Hardy's most popular
novels

19. 
Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of
Hemingway's most enduring works. Told
in language of great simplicity and power,
it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman,
down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal --
a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant
marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly
contemporary style, the classic themes of
courage in the face of defeat and of personal
triumph won from loss. Written in 1952,
this hugely successful novella confirmed his
power and presence in the literary world
and played a large part in his winning the
1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

20. Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki,
Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960 when he was 5 years old.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the
English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize
nominations, and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the
Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50
greatest British writers since 1945".
A moving novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a
haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-
one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic
English countryside where the children were sheltered from the
outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that
their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the
society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this
idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come
back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. With the
dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face
the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now. A tale of
deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an
extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place
among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.

21. The Remains of the Day is a profoundly
compelling portrait of the perfect English
butler and of his fading, insular world
postwar England. At the end of his three
decades of service at Darlington Hall,
Stevens embarks on a country drive,
during which he looks back over his career
to reassure himself that he has served
humanity by serving "a great gentleman."
But lurking in his memory are doubts
about the true nature of Lord Darlington's
"greatness" and graver doubts about his
own faith in the man he served. A tragic,
spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler
and his reaction to his fading insular world
in post-war England.

22. James Joyce
Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language
and exploration of new literary methods
Dubliners is a book of short stories set
in the city of Dublin. The stories are
arranged to represent childhood,
adolescence, maturity, and public life.
The final story, The Dead, is
considered a world masterpiece.

23. 
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de
Kérouac, was an American novelist and
poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast
and, alongside William S. Burroughs and
Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat
Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his
method of spontaneous prose.
Thematically, his work covers topics such
as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity,
Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel.

24. Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is that rare entity: a work for the stage that is profoundly moving yet very funny,
highly theatrical yet steeped in traditional literary values, and most of all deeply American in its attitudes and political
concerns. In two full-length plays—”Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”--Kushner tells the story of a handful
of people trying to make sense of the world. Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become
involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous
breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American
conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some
sort of personal salvation in his beliefs.
But such a summary does not do justice to Kushner's grand plan, which mixes magical realism with political speeches,
high comedy with painful tragedy, and stitches it all together with a daring sense of irony and a moral vision that
demands respect and attention. On one level, the play is an indictment of the government led by Ronald Reagan, from
the blatant disregard for the AIDS crisis to the flagrant political corruption. But beneath the acute sense of political and
moral outrage lies a meditation on what it means to live and die--of AIDS, or anything else--in a society that cares less
and less about human life and basic decency. The play's breadth and internal drive is matched by its beautiful writing
and unbridled compassion. Winner of two Tony Awards and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Angels in America is
one of the most outstanding plays of the American theater. --Michael Bronski

25. D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence was a major British author of the
20th Century. He explored themes of human
sexuality and questions of moral behavior.
Inspired by the long-standing affair
between Frieda, Lawrence's German wife,
and an Italian peasant who eventually
became her third husband, Lady
Chatterley's Lover is the story of Constance
Chatterley, who, while trapped in an
unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine
owner whose war wounds have left him
paralyzed and impotent, has an affair with
Mellors, the gamekeeper.

26. 
W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham’s masterpiece ponders three
elements of love — love for oneself, love for
someone else, and the love of others — in a
way that’s still relevant today.

27. Ian McEwan
British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter whose
restrained, refined prose style accentuated the horror of his
dark humor and perverse subject matter.
Imaginative thirteen-year-old Briony
Tallis, misinterpreting a scene between
her older sister Cecilia and Robbie
Turner, the housekeeper's son, later
accuses Robbie of a crime she has no
proof he committed and spends years
trying to atone for her actions.

28. 
Herman Melville

29. David Mitchell
David Mitchell is an English novelist, who has written five
novels, two of which, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were
shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has lived in Italy, Japan
and Ireland.
A collection of disparate characters from
different countries and centuries find their
stories linked through a bizarre series of
events.

30. George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English
novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose,
awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism and commitment
to democratic socialism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four and the allegorical novella Animal Farm, which together have
sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. In
2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British
writers since 1945".
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling
Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skillfully rewrites the past
to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against
the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute
obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens
and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the
Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a
secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon
discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

31. Dorothy Sayers
Scholar and writer best known for her mystery
stories featuring the witty and charming Lord Peter
Wimsey.
Mystery novelist Harriet Vane knows all
about poisons, and when her fiancé dies
in a manner described in one of her
books, a jury of her peers think a
hangman's noose is the answer. But Lord
Peter Wimsey is determined to find
Harriet innocent--and make her his wife.
Three books required

32. Peter Shaffer
Peter Shaffer was born in 1926 and is known as one of
Britain’s best modern playwrights. He is versatile and
has a knack for creating smash hits.

34. 
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. , was an American author of twenty-seven books, including
sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is
widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden,
and the novella Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1962 "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic
humor and keen social perception".
Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas
Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel
follows the intertwined destinies of two
families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—
whose generations helplessly reenact the fall
of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry
of Cain and Abel.

35. J. R. R. Tolkien
“The Ring Cycle”
Three books required

36. 
 The Color Purple, by American author
Alice Walker, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction and the National Book Award
for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film
and musical of the same name.
 Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the
story focuses on the life of African-
American women in the southern United
States in the 1930s, addressing numerous
issues including their exceedingly low
position in American social culture. The
novel has been the frequent target of
censors and appears on the American
Library Association list of the 100 Most
Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009
at number seventeen because of the
sometimes explicit content, particularly in
terms of violence.
Alice Walker

37. Evelyn Waugh
English writer regarded by many as the most brilliant
satirical novelist of his day. Waugh's novels, although
always derived from firsthand experience, are unusually
highly wrought and precisely written.

38. H. G. Wells
English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, best
known for his science fiction novels.

39. Oscar Wilde
Wilde was born in Dublin and was a playwright, novelist,
essayist, and poet. Wilde was criticized for his
homosexuality and lifestyle choices.

40. 
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was
an American playwright and author of many
stage classics.
After years of obscurity, he became suddenly
famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944),
closely reflecting his own unhappy family
background. This heralded a string of
successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and
Sweet Bird of Youth. His later work attempted
a new style that did not appeal to audiences,
and alcohol and drug dependence further
inhibited his creative output.

41. August Wilson was an American playwright whose work
included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which
he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a
different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of
the African-American experience in the 20th century

42. 
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by
chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral
after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel
is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across
the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and
raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and
self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on
the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. Black Boy is Richard Wright's
powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed
confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.
Richard Wright

43. Virginia Woolf
British author who made an original
contribution to the form of the novel
and was one of the most
distinguished critics of her time.
In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel,
Woolf has created a character liberated from the
restraints of time and sex. Born in the
Elizabethan Age to wealth and position,
Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning
of the story-and a modern woman three
centuries later.

44. Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (Play)
George Bernard Shaw
Playright: Pygmalion
Athol Fugard- South African
Playwright

45. 
The Epic, the Quest, &The Fantastical

46. 
The Horror

47. 
Mystery

48. Anthony Burgess Sir Thomas More
• Aldous Huxley
• H.G. Wells
• George Orwell
• Kazuo Ishiguro
• David Mitchell
• J.G. Ballard
• Sir Thomas More