Newest Study Guides
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man, first published in 2022, is a speculative fiction novel about each member of a majority-white society spontaneously developing brown skin.
Set in an unnamed English-speaking country that has similarities to...
The Old Man and the Sea was published 1952 after the bleakest ten years in Hemingway's literary career. His last major work, Across the River and into the Trees, was condemned as unintentional self-parody, and people began to think that Hemingway...
Nikki Erlick is an American author based in Los Angeles, CA. The Measure, Erlick's debut novel and her first attempt at a full-length manuscript, was published in June 2022 and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Erlick has explained that...
"A Small Needful Fact" is one of Ross Gay's most well-known poems. It was originally published by the poetry organization Split This Rock in 2015, and was shared widely across social media. Responding to the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of...
Originally a short story, "Wool" takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity lives in an underground silo. After receiving positive feedback on his work, author Hugh Howey expanded the story into a novel-length text, which he...
Killers of the Flower Moon, published in 2017, is a nonfiction book by journalist David Grann. It follows the investigation of several high-profile murders within the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe in Oklahoma.
The book begins in 1920, with...
"The Fish" is one of Elizabeth Bishop's most celebrated and widely anthologized works. First published in 1946 in the collection North & South, the poem describes the experience of a speaker who catches a fish and then closely observes its...
Oodgeroo Noonuccal is an Aboriginal Australian writer and political activist whose work centers the experience of indigenous people in Australia. "We Are Going," a poem originally published in her 1964 collection of the same name, examines the...
Dickens published his twelfth novel, A Tale of Two Cities, in his own literary journal called All the Year Round in weekly installments from April to November of 1859. He got the germ of the idea for the novel from a play by Wilkie Collins called...
Written by Charlie Brooker and first aired in 2011, "The National Anthem" is a Black Mirror episode about a British Prime Minister being coerced to have sex with a pig on live television in exchange for the safe return of a kidnapped princess....
There are some significant doubts over the authorship of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a Jacobean play most frequently attributed to William Shakespeare. It is widely agreed that the Bard was the author of the main portion of the play that follows...
Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is primarily known for his novels, such as The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), but in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) he tackles climate change through the lenses of...
Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England" was published in 1976, in the poet's last collection, Geography III. It retells the well-known narrative of Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe's early English novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe's...
Luckiest Girl Alive is the debut novel by American novelist Jessica Knoll. It was published in 2015, at which time Knoll was working as an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. The novel sold well, and made the New York Times Bestsellers List. The...
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Richard Cory," originally published in Robinson's 1897 collection The Children of the Night,...
Edwin Arlington Robinson was an early-twentieth-century American poet who wrote about ordinary people using traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter. "Miniver Cheevy," a narrative poem published in Robinson's 1910 collection The Town Down The...
People of the Whale is a novel by American author Linda Hogan. Published in 2008, it depicts the trials of a Native American man named Thomas, and various members of his family, as they struggle with the loss of their culture in the face of...
Written and directed by John Hughes, The Breakfast Club (1985) is a comedy-drama film about five teenagers who forge unexpected bonds over the course of an all-day detention.
Taking place over eight hours inside a fictional Illinois high school,...
Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516. The work was written in Latin and it was published in Louvain (present-day Belgium). Utopia is a work of satire, indirectly criticizing Europe's political corruption and religious hypocrisy. More was a...
Helen Dunmore was a British author whose work addresses themes of motherhood, war, friendship, childhood, and nature. Originally published in her 2007 collection Glad of These Times, the poem “To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is a dramatic monologue in...
"won't you celebrate with me" is a poem by the American writer Lucille Clifton. One of Clifton's better-known works, "won't you celebrate with me" was published in Clifton's 1993 poetry collection Book of Light. Like much of her work, it explores...
Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race is a 2016 memoir about growing up Black in a mostly white suburb of Sydney, Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Covering her early childhood to the end of high school, Clarke details the near-constant racist...
Volpone was published first in 1607 as a quarto and then in 1616 as part of Jonson's collected Workes. In the later edition, the date of the first performance of Volpone is listed as 1605. However, many scholars speculate that the first...
Flight Behavior, published in 2012, explores a young woman's life as a housewife in fictional Feathertown, Tennessee. Dellarobia Turnbow quickly attracts both local and national attention after discovering a large colony of monarch butterflies in...