Newest Study Guides

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) combines the personal and professional experiences of Ken Kesey and reflects the culture in which it was written, yet it stands strong on its own merits. Kesey developed the novel while a graduate student in...

Green Grass, Running Water is Thomas King's second novel. King began writing it in 1989 during a one-month writer's residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. The novel was published in 1993 and received positive critical reception. It was...

The Phantom Tollbooth is a children's book written in 1961 by Norton Juster, an architect with a passion for planning, order, and, especially, maps. Basing the main character, Milo, on himself, Juster created an adventure story filled with...

Directed by relative newcomer Barry Jenkins, Moonlight is a film adapted from Terell Alvin McCraney’s play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Production on the film, financed by A24, PASTEL, and Plan B, began in late 2015; the film was released...

Anton Chekhov devoted several of his stories to the lives of ordinary people; in some famous cases, he focused specifically on unknown, obscure, and miserable individuals. One such poignant work is "Vanka," the story of a lonely peasant boy who...

Harriet The Spy is a children's novel written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh. Published in 1964, it was an immediate hit and has been called a classic, appearing on three national lists of the best children's novels of all time.

The novel...

The Homecoming is one of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s most compelling and critically acclaimed plays. Disturbing, enigmatic, and darkly comic, it has been staged continually since its 1965 debut. Pinter’s own words in 1970 when accepting the...

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is a vastly influential Modernist poem by Wallace Stevens. It was first printed in October 1917 in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, and then in Stevens' groundbreaking first book, Harmonium. The poem...

The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's autobiography, written during her time at Radcliffe College and published when she was 22 years old. It details her life from birth to age 21, beginning with an account of her family's home in Alabama and the...

Published in 1989, I for Isobel follows a thoughtful young woman named Isobel Callaghan as she deals with family conflict, personal independence, and the awakening of her literary ambitions. This short, incisive novel is the defining work of...

Jean Toomer’s Cane is one of the most influential works in the history of African-American literature. A “literary work” is truly the most appropriate term for Cane, certainly more appropriate than “novel.” Cane is comprised of sketches written in...

July's People, published in 1981 by Nadine Gordimer, is set during a counterfactual revolutionary civil war in South Africa, in which black South Africans rise up and overthrow their white oppressors, with the aid of neighboring African nations....

Into Thin Air is Jon Krakauer's third novel, adapted from an article he published in Outside magazine following the tragic events of May 1996 on the slopes of Mt. Everest. At the time of its publication in 1997, Into Thin Air garnered widespread...

Three Day Road is author Joseph Boyden's debut novel, published in 2005 to critical and commercial approval. The novel was inspired in part by the war stories Boyden heard growing up, from both his father (a World War II veteran) and his...

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is Modernist poet Wallace Stevens at his most whimsical, and his most notoriously evasive. Originally published in 1922, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” was included in Stevens’ 1923 debut collection, Harmonium. This poem...

Outcasts United is a book published in 2009 by author and journalist Warren St. John.

The book tackles contemporary issues faced by refugees, especially those from Africa and the Middle East, who have been placed in the United States. The book...

Station Eleven is a critically acclaimed 2015 novel by up-and-coming author Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven was a National Book Award Finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist. The novel was listed as one of the best books of the year by...

J. M. Coetzee retells a familiar story in Foe yet challenges that very familiarity. Even people who have never read the novel Robinson Crusoe are relatively well acquainted with its iconic portrait of survival after a shipwreck, as well as with...

Njal's Saga is the longest and the most revered of the forty family sagas written in Iceland between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The events of the saga come from several different sources, including oral tales, The Book of Settlements...

The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost Stories is a compendium of horror stories by the celebrated writer Ambrose Bierce, renowned for his eerie tales of the American countryside and his biting wit. HP Lovecraft wrote of Ambrose Bierce, "Virtually all...

"The Snow Man" is one of modernist master Wallace Stevens' most acclaimed poems, and it is also one of his earliest. Originally published in the October 1921 issue of Poetry magazine, it then appeared in Stevens' first full-length collection, ...

A narrative of loss, struggle, and redemption in the wake of World War II, Ceremony (1977) ranks among the defining works of Native-American poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. Although Ceremony is normally classified as a novel, the text is in...

Arthur Conan Doyle published The Valley of Fear in serial form in Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. A book form followed the British serialization in 1915. The manuscript, 176 folio pages with Doyle’s deletions and revisions,...

Ever wonder what happens when an author passes away before his or her next book is completed? Z for Zachariah is one answer to that question. Author Robert C. O’Brien is probably most famous for his Newberry Award-winning classic Mrs. Frisby and...