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.
The Lemon Tree, written by Sandy Tolan, was published in 2006. The narrative concerns two families, both in Al-Ramla, one Arab and one Jewish. When Bashir Khairi goes to visit his own house in Al-Ramla he was forced to leave, he finds Dalia...
War Dances is a collection of short stories and poems written by Sherman Alexie and published in 2009. In 2010, War Dances won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Sherman Alexie is a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene-American artist, writing novels, short...
The Wife of Martin Guerre is a short novel (or novella) that is based on the strange but true footnotes of history. A man named Arnaud du Tilh was tried in the 16th century for impersonating another man. The key component here is that Janet Lewis...
Alain Locke is an American author born on September 13, 1885 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a child, he was raised in an academia-focused family as his parents were educators who instilled in him a passion for the arts and literature. After...
Walter H. Miller, Jr. won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961 for his nuclear tragicomedy A Canticle for Leibowitz. In the wake of such critical acclaim and recognition, the novel enjoyed commercial success unlike anything Miller had experienced...
The Woman and the Ape is a novel published by the Danish author Peter Høeg in 1996. The novel came after another series of novel that were well received but unfortunately, The woman and the ape was not as well received as the novels before it and...
A former Stegner fellow and a current creative writing teacher at the University of Idaho, Mr. Daniel Orozco, receives more and more recognition as a prominent short story writer. His debut collection of works Orientation that consists of 9...
Science Fiction is, more often than not, discredited as “light” literature. However, Ursula K. Le Guin’s body of work has been consistently praised for its exploration of themes of equality, gender politics, or xenophobia. In Le Guin’s novels, the...
Louis MacNeice belonged to a generation of authors and poets called the Auden Group after the group's most well-known member, W. H. Auden. Though his contemporaries were avid political writers, Louis preferred a slower, more balanced tone that...
The Artificial Silk Girl was written by German author Irmgard Keun. She was inspired by Anita Loo's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, leading her to describe pre-Nazi German life from a woman's perspective as well as through the lens of cinematic charisma...
In 1959, Richard Wright would finally complete a long, arduous process of creating a collection of his works that he had begun way back in 1944. At that time, his vision was an anthology to be titled "Seven Men" that would consist entirely of...
Quiet Torrential Sound is a very short play requiring a limited cast and setting published by Joan Ackermann in 1995. The play was also published in its entirety as part of the compilation volume, Ten Minute Plays from the Actor Theater of...
Michael Symmons Roberts, born in Preston, England in 1963, is one of Britain's foremost contemporary poets. Alongside teaching - Symmons is the Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, Symmons has won an array of literary prizes...
Before her tragically premature early death from cancer at age 48, Michele Serros was one of the rising stars of the increasingly popular and influential publishing niche of Hispanic-American literature. She was a leading member of what is...
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is a nonfiction book written by acclaimed journalist Katherine Boo, first published in 2012.
India is growing at a faster pace than ever. This growth has been documented...
Jamaica Kincaid wrote At the Bottom of the River, which consists of thoughtful, poetic short stories. This book was published in 2010. Within these short stories, Kincaid allows readers to explore the dichotomies of life.
In her narratives,...
Too Far to Go is a collection of short stories that were written by John Updike and published in 1979. They were published at the same time when a television movie was released of these stories. John Updike is an American author who writes novels,...
More popularly known by its German title Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy actually covers four volumes that were published over a period spanning 1867 to 1905. The final three volumes were all published after Marx’s...
John Marrant was a black man born in 1755 in New York. He was literate, and he could also play the violin and French horn. He also converted to Christianity, to the chagrin of his parents and family. He was forced to move away from them, and he...
“Dave’s Neckliss” (1889) is a short story written by one of the first African-American authors to enjoy success as a writer of fiction: Charles Chesnutt. His reputation was established on the basis of what came to be known as “dialect stories”...
“The Freedom of the Will” is an essay by Desiderius Erasmus, otherwise known as Erasmus of Rotterdam or just simply Erasmus. Erasmus was a Dutch Christian Humanist considered one of the greatest scholarly minds of the Renaissance. In 1520 Martin...
The Short Fiction of D.H. Lawrence is a collection of Lawrence’s short stories. Lawrence was an English novelist who was a prolific writer and artist, and this collection emphasizes his perspective on how modernization and the world after the...
Jack Finney first published a short story titled “Sleep No More” in Colliers Magazine in 1954. A year later, that short story had been fleshed out into novel length and given the lurid, but exponentially more marketable title The Body Snatchers. A...
Gita Mehta is the author of two previous books, Karma Cola and Raj. Karma Cola is a documentary satire while Raj is a work of historical fiction.
A River Sutra is a lyrical series of interlocking stories that transport the reader to a contemporary...