A "Literature Circle" is a group of students reading the same novel, and producing a common goal or projects through cooperative learning. The authors give specific guidelines and procedures to help you establish, administer, and evaluate a successful reading program. Each unit includes a summary of a novel, a reproducible vocabulary list, and a variety of group activities that inspire collaboration, assumption of responsibility, critical thinking, and thoughtful use of the story. Grades 3-8.

Julia Alvarez made her mark on the American literary horizon with the 1991 publication of her debut novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a story based on her own family's bicultural experiences. Readers and critics alike quickly discovered the writer's penchant for extracting humor from hardship, and weaving personal history into vivid prose. Within a decade, Alvarez had published three more highly acclaimed novels, including !Yo! (1997), a delightful sequel to her first novel. This Critical Companion introduces readers to the life and works of Dominican American writer Alvarez and examines the thematic and cultural concerns that run through her novels.

The Companion embraces the full range of this rich and heterogeneous subject, covering: specific British and Irish novels and novelists ranging from Samuel Beckett to Salman Rushdie; particular subgenres such as the feminist novel and the postcolonial novel; overarching cultural, political, and literary trends such as screen adaptations and the literary prize phenomenon. All the essays are informed by current critical and theoretical debates, but are designed to be accessible to non-specialists.

A novel set in colonial South Africa, where a lonely sheepfarmer makes a bid for private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, while his daughter dreams of and executes a bloody revenge. From the author of DUSKLANDS and WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS.

In the Heart of the Country tells the story of Magda, an old spinster who lives а huis clos with her father, her step-mother and the servants Henrik and Klein Anna, on a far-flung farm in the middle of the veld. The novel is set at an unspecified time, the present tense heightens this sense of timelessness. Madga's dis-aster starts at her birth since she is not the male heir that the baas has long wished for and who will keep the lineage alive. Therefore, Magda's only way of making a show of resistance to this despotic patriarch is to write her story and make her voice heard so as not to be "one of the forgotten ones of history".

An Outcast of the Islands is the second novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1896, inspired by Conrad's experience as mate of a steamer, the Vigar.
The novel details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Singapore, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the trial chief's daughter. The story features Conrad's recurring character Tom Lingard, who also appears in Almayer's Folly (1895) and The Rescue (1920), in addition to sharing other characters with those novels.
This novel was adapted for the screen in 1952 by director Carol Reed, featuring Trevor Howard as Willems, Ralph Richardson as Lingard, Robert Morley, and Wendy Hiller.