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.
Naomi Klein, author of ‘On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a New Deal’, has been an activist against capitalism’s exploitative practices since 1999. Scathing critiques against the world’s largest and most powerful brands for their unethical...
Few ancient texts are known today -- and even fewer are still in print. Chinese General Sun Tzu's The Art of War is one of the few ancient texts still known, published, and widely read across the world. To that end, The Art of War has been...
An American Marriage is an interesting novel. Part of it is told in the third person; other parts are told in the first person in an epistolary form (i.e. letters). It tells the story of a middle-class black couple named Roy and Celestial. The two...
To date, British Playwright Alan Ayckbourn has written over 79 published and/or performed full-length plays. Absurd Person Singular is his 12th play. It first premiered off-Broadway in 1972 and on-Broadway in October of 1974 and received very...
Leigh Hunt was a famous Romantic writer, editor, and critic who lived from 1784 to 1859. Being a prominent literary figure he was the contemporary of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Hunt's literary career began with the...
To the North was originally published in 1932, a time when few women writers were able to get the same fame and notoriety as their male counterparts. Elizabeth Bowen and To the North helped to change that. Bowen's fascinating life is reflected in...
Although it is a very short book, Man's Search for Meaning is perhaps one of the most significant and impactful works of nonfiction published in the relatively recent past. The first portion of the book chronicles Frankl's experiences in Auschwitz...
Interestingly, Nobody Knows My Name is not an exceptionally unique book in James Baldwin's vast and impressive bibliography. It would be fair to assume that an author most famous for his novels would have written more novels than essays. That is...
A black comedy come drama movie, A Serious Man takes a not-so-serious look at one Jewish man's crisis of faith after his professional and personal life implodes. It shows what can happen when a person's orderly, well-arranged life can start to...
The Consolidator or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, is a 1705 satirical fantasy/science fiction novel by English author Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.
As described by Karen Severud Cook in her article "Daniel...
On November 28th, 2018, Margaret Atwood announced a sequel to her 1985 classic novel The Handmaid's Tale. Announcing the novel on her Twitter profile, she wrote: "Yes indeed to those who asked: I’m writing a sequel to The #HandmaidsTale....
Nikole Hannah-Jones became a staff writer for the New York Times in 2016; she devised the 1619 Project to take another look at the legacy of slavery in the United States, its release neatly coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of the...
In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.
For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a...
Published in 1939, as Britain was entering a period of great austerity due to the declaration of war against Germany, Party Going might at first seem like a wholly tone-deaf novel for its time, largely because it deals with a group of wealthy...
The story of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (originally published in 1952) is an interesting one to say the least. Highsmith originally published the book under the name Claire Morgan because she feared becoming "a lesbian book writer" and...
It is strange that there are very few mentions of Athenagoras' writings by other early Christian apologists, because he was well-known, and was also considered influential amongst both his peers and early Christians alike. He was respected for the...
Graham Greene's A Gun for Sale (1936) is not one of Greene's best novels, but it is perhaps one of his most important. It set the stage for what was to come in his ultra-famous novel Brighton Rock, which tells the story of, as the title and some...
It's very likely that few people today who are not serious literary scholars have ever heard of Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh's excellent satirical novel mocking the rich and decadent society of London after World War I (published in 1930). However,...
Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) is a collection of short stories by Sui Sin Far (who published the collection under the name pen name Edith Maude Eaton). Although not incredibly popular, the collection was incredibly important because it marked the...
If given the opportunity to name one of the best films ever made, many would justifiably cite Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965) as their favorite. Adapted from the 1959 stage play of the same name, the film tells the true story of the Von...
When Grease was released in the summer of 1978, few people would have predicted that it would become one of the movie industry's biggest cult hits of all time; nor would they have imagined that generations yet unborn would know the movie's lyrics...
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (released in 1991 and called T2 for short) is one of the few cases in film history where a sequel is considered better than the original film (in this case, 1984's The Terminator). Directed and co-written once again by...
Guy de Maupassant is one of the most popular writers of the second half of the 19th century. He is the author of six novels, 260 short stories, essays, articles, poems and plays. In 1880 with the publication of “Boule de Suif” Maupassant appeared...
Cereus Blooms at Night was written by Trinidadian filmmaker/artist/writer Shani Mootoo. The book tells the story of an older lady named Mala Ramchandin through the eyes -- and mouth -- of a lively and energetic nurse named Tyler. Set in the...