A Few Days By Michael Cunningham

    As the time passes she can clearly see the woman in the paper. The woman in the paper is quiet and peaceful during the day, but at night she is imprisoned by the bars in the paper. This is reflection helps the narrator identify her own bars--her husband John. He is away during the day and at home in the same bed with her at night. She also identifies with the woman in the paper by sharing their similar routine. "At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be"..."by daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy its the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour".

Nellie Bly was born May 5th, 1864 in a small town called Cochran Mills in Pennsylvania. Nellie’s real name is Elizabeth Cochrane. Nellie was a Journalist; she began her newspaper career at the age of 18. Nellie got her pseudonym from her editor, who refused to openly allow a female to write for his paper.

Science fiction is a way for an author to express their concerns in the world while using fiction to bring up controversial ideas. In Unwind , Neal Shusterman is able to incorporate science fiction in a way to not only get his points across but to also make the reader think, and adjust the message to relate to one's own life. Unwind takes place in the future where it is an option for parents to choose to have their child unwound, meaning they would be taken from their family and taken apart. Their body parts would then be given to someone who is sick or injured. The reader is introduced to the main characters: three teenagers who have relatable backgrounds to teenage readers in order to help one connect and feel a part of the story. As readers start learning about these characters, Lev, Connor and Risa, new issues develop which create life or death situations that these adolescence have to deal with alone. While this story is science fictional the plot of these kids struggling to find who they are and what their purpose is, while their parents have given up on them, is something most readers can relate to in one way or another, whether it’s being unsure about the future, having family problems, or being told something can’t be done. In Unwind, the author, Neal Shusterman,

Some Kind of Courage, is written for children between fifth and eighth grade in terms of

The author of “The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War” is David Laskin. Laskin, born in New York, attended the New College, and earned MA in English. Laskin wrote several books about history, travel, and literary biography. In “The Long Way Home”, Laskin shares the struggles the immigrants had to face in America; an endeavor to start over in the land of opportunities, and the ordeal of their return to Europe in uniform to fight.

In “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, Minnie Foster Wright is the prime suspect of her husband’s murder; she breaks the bond of marriage through her own efforts simply because she no longer wishes to have a life with John Wright. She becomes so weary from her plight that she sees no other way out except to kill her husband. A neighbor, Mr. Hale, finds the freshly widowed wife sitting in her rocking chair pleating her apron the morning after her husband’s murder. Without remorse, Ms. Minnie explains the situation bluntly to Mr. Hale by saying, “He died of a rope around his neck” (493). Unlike Sheriff Peters and the county attorney, Mrs. Hale has sympathy for Minnie because she knows that the Wright home has never been filled with love.

Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs is a crime fiction book, where, a forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan tries to unveil the identity of three skeletons that were found in the basement of a pizza parlor in Montreal, Canada. Brennan works with homicide detectives Luc Claudel and his partner, Michel Charbonneau, and Andrew Ryan, who is also her lover. Throughout the book, both Brennan and Claudel doubted each other’s competence to solve the case. According to Brennan institution, she believes that the three skeletons might be recent, however, Claudel speculates it to be century old due to findings of three antique buttons near their bodies. As a result, Claudel puts very little effort in this case, whereas, Brennan is determined to identify the year of death so to validate her inspection and to drew attention of Claudel and her other colleagues to this case. In the process of solving this investigation, she finds herself dragged to other homicides that were affiliated with the three skeleton remains.

The Long Way Home was written by author David Laskin. Laskin is an American writer of books concerning history, particularly The Children’s Blizzard, The Family and The Long Way Home. His first and only book about World War I was The Long Way Home, making him a new-comer to the scene. Although he appears to be novice, his numerous reputable sources included in the tail-end of the book and all-encompassing index would prove otherwise, giving him credibility and ethos in his writing. In Laskin’s book, he speaks of immigration in the United States, and tells specifically about twelve immigrants from several different countries in Europe, whose lives would be forever changed by the Great War. He speaks of the twelve and their extremely difficult journeys with great reverence, complementing them their ability to serve and willingness to do so.

3. Mark Owen’s memoir No Easy Day is a first-person account of a Navy Seal who witnessed the take down of Osama bin Laden. Owen describes the journey of becoming a SEAL and the countless missions of which he was a part. He illustrates the work of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, known as SEAL Team Six. The readers are taken along with the team right into the line of fire. They hear first time accounts of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips in the Indian Ocean in 2009, stories of street attacks in Iraq and, primarily, the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. He describes the process of becoming a soldier for SEAL Team Six and numerous hours spent to prove his readiness. As Owen told CBS’s Scott Pelley on 60

She contemplated to herself, “she could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind--her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody--in this battered world…” (Cunningham 152). Laura reaches her turning point where she intends to commit suicide. She have grown solemn from her internal conflicts and wanted to take a permanent end to her life. However, she changed her mind and exclaimed “She loves life...

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

In the story “One of These Days” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it is narrated in the third person. The story is looked through a non-biased perspective, because the narrator describes neither Aurelio Escovar’s thinking nor that of the Mayor. Marquez does not demonstrate the conflicts between the Mayor and the dentist, instead he opens readers’ imagination. The narrator tells the story by describing the environment and behaviors of main characters. After the Mayor entered Escovar’s office, Marquez wrote, “It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, glass case with ceramic bottles.”

The Hours is a movie that won the most awards in 2002.The movie is mainly about relationships, love, and death. This movie follows a single day in the lives of three women in different time periods between 1941 to 2001.The clothes that all three of these women wore were from different time periods. It is apparent from this movie that throughout history women were faced with trials and tribulations. Through each of their lives they battled with their own identity and the roles that they should play in society. In fact, this movie is mostly based on three women and their reflection on the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf is the author of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, accordingly Laura Brown, reads

It is considerably easier to identify the queerness of the novel’s characters and author than its political purpose. Michael Cunningham, the novel’s author, is a gay male and openly acknowledges that his sexual orientation influences his work – as can be seen by the fact that many of his novels involve gay characters and gay experiences. In particular, The Hours features three women who each have same-sex experiences – Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn.

In "Man of The Hours", an interview published in People magazine, Michael Cunningham describes The Hours as "essentially an optimistic book that deals with the terrible things that happen to people"(105). More precisely, the book is about three women living in different eras and addresses several issues, among them homosexuality, suicide, and feminism.