Newest Study Guides

Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is famous not just for its amusing, allegorical content, but also because it has the distinction of being the only surviving Roman novel in its entirety. It was published in the 2nd century CE and has endured as a classic...

Described by fans as a cross between Game of Thrones and X-Men, The Young Elites is the first book of author Marie Lu’s latest trilogy. It is an epic fantasy set in an alternate world that has a medieval European feel. Amongst its contemporaries...

Ally Condie primarily drew inspiration for Matched from a conversation she and her husband had over dinner one night in late 2008. He posed the question: what if someone wrote the perfect algorithm for matching people with one another, and the...

The History Boys is one of Alan Bennett’s most celebrated plays. The narrative is heavily inspired by Bennett's own experiences in school and the process through which he gained entrance to Oxford. Bennett says, “[The play draws] on some of the...

The Garden of Forking Paths is a collection of eight short stories by Borges, published in late 1941 by the Argentinian journal Sur. It is the most famous collection of his work, in particular because of its title story, which gained international...

Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. At this point, Dahl had been writing for some time and his timeless work James and the Giant Peach had already been published. This novel, however, is Dahl’s most well known. It is...

Milos Forman's film, Amadeus, was critically acclaimed and a commercial success upon its release in 1984. At the 57th Academy Awards, the film won eight of the eleven nominations that it received. The wins included Best Director, Best Actor (F....

We is the most renowned work of Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin and one of the most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century.

Although the novel was completed in 1921 and published in the US in 1924, it was not published in its country of...

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is perhaps Joyce Carol Oates most widely read and anthologized short story, and, as one critic wrote, “justly so” (Gale 257). First published in the 1996 edition of the journal Epoch and later reprinted...

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is one of Samuel Johnson’s most famous works and his only novel. Styled as a parable or essay as much as a novel (it has been referred to, at times, as a “moral fable,” a “philosophical romance,” and a...

The Sandman, written in in 1817, is one of Hoffmann's most well known stories.

Sigmund Freud gave an interpretation of the story in his essay "The Uncanny," written almost 100 years later in 1919. The essay uses the story to help define a literary...

D.H. Lawrence spent the last five years of his life in Europe, mostly in Italy, where he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. He had left England in 1919, following a stance of non-participation in World War I. (He was deemed physically unfit to be...

The Portrait of a Lady is considered one of Henry James' best works, and it was his first large commercial success. The book was published in serial installments simultaneously in MacMillan's Magazine (in England) and the Atlantic. Up until this...

First published in 1861, Utilitarianism constituted Mill's fullest treatment of the moral theory that was responsible for much of his philosophy. Following in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham, in this work Mill provides the capstone paper outlining...

Since Adam Bede is the product of George Eliot's first serious attempt to write a novel, it is a good source for identifying some features of her development as a novelist and for seeing signs of themes in her later novels. Moreover, despite its...

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a unique novel in that the text includes an account of its own writing. Like his protagonist Raoul Duke, Thompson was working as a freelance journalist when Sports Illustrated hired him to help cover the Mint 400...

Kokoro (こゝろ), written by the famous Japanese author Natsume Soseki, was published in serial form by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, for which he worked, in 1914. That year, two years had passed since the death of Emperor Meiji, under whose...

Edmund Spenser wrote the Amoretti (Italian for "Cupids") ostensibly to woo Elizabeth Boyle, a young lady whom he met during his tenure in Ireland. Spenser shared these poems with Elizabeth for over a year before she consented to marry him. The...

A huge sweeping novel, which has never been out of print since its publication, Atlas Shrugged has become a part of the national dialogue about personal freedom, economic policy, and political philosophy in America. There have been several...

Tender is the Night (1934) is F. Scott Fitzgerald's last completed novel. The story, primarily about human deterioration, the disintegration of love and marriage, and the mental illness that both causes and results from these troubles, was...

I Will Marry When I Want is one of the famed Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s most revered plays. Set in post-independence Kenya, the play is a searing look at the legacies of colonialism and the myriad difficulties Kenyans faced in the...

Gennifer Albin's first novel, Crewel, explores one girl's experience navigating the dysfunctional social and political systems of a completely controlled dystopian society. Published in 2012, Crewel is the first book in the Crewel trilogy. It...

Published in 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was met with immediate critical and popular success when it first appeared. An American realist novel set during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck's work documents hard times...

What is the What is a 2006 novel written by Dave Eggers. While Eggars takes full authorship of the book, the story is the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Deng is a Sudanese refugee and was a member of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

After...