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.
Shreds of Tenderness is a 2001 play by Ugandan playwright John Ruganda. It explores themes of greed, individualism, and betrayal on a familial and national level and features conflict over everything from crops to political power.
The play takes...
Gurinder Chadha's Bridge and Prejudice (released in the United Kingdom in 2004 and the United States in 2005) is a Bollywood-style remake of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice. The film follows four unmarried daughters in an Indian family....
Widely renowned as one of the greatest writers of our modern era, Haruki Murakami wrote After the Quake after the catastrophic Kobe earthquake in 1995. The collection of short stories was first published in Japan in 2000, with an English...
Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a freelance reporter who is recording the violent events taking place in the middle of the night in downtown Los Angeles, and sending them to the local television news station. He is an ambulance chaser,...
In 1995, Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton first worked together in the blockbuster smash Apollo 13, but despite the movie's success, and the two actors' obvious on-screen compatibility, they did not work together again for another twenty two years, when...
T2 Trainspotting (2017) is the sequel to 1996's smash-hit Trainspotting (which made $72 million against a budget of only $1.7 million). It stars many of the actors from the first film (like Ewan McGregor, who reprised his role as Mark Renton) and...
In 1960, French author Albert Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident. Prior to his death, Camus published a number of great works like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He was also working a brand new novel entitled The First Man,...
Nathaniel Hawthorn owes the writing of his last novel, The Marble Faun, to the fact that Franklin Pierce was such an incompetent President that even today, more than 150 years and 30 contenders later, he still consistently ranks among the five...
Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was a satirical political film produced, directed, written , starring, and scored by the famed British actor and comedian, Charlie Chaplin. The film makes fun of the Nazi Regime in Germany, which was at its...
Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son,...
J.D. Salinger is best known for the coming-of-angst novel The Catcher In The Rye, but he is also revered and respected as one of America's pre-eminent writers of short stories as well. His career as a short story writer began when he was still in...
Sometimes it is necessary to have another income source when one is first thinking about becoming a poet. Such was life for American poet and essayist Dana Gioia, who spent the first fifteen years of his writing career penning feverishly at night...
Included in Tobias Wolff's book Back in the World are ten stories (ranging from "The Missing Person" to "The Rich Brother") which cover rather normal people in abnormal situations. In one story, a kind and gentle priest finds himself in a Las...
Not to be confused with the Laurel and Hardy movie of the same name that was released six years previously, Leo McCarey's Duck Soup was the last of five Marx Brothers movies to be released by Paramount Studios. It also marked the ending of the...
The speed of Wendelin Van Draanen's prose is extremely quick, and mirrors the speed around the track of her protagonist, sixteen year old Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star who loses a leg when her track team's bus collides with a car...
In 1862, during his Presidency, Abraham Lincoln's beloved son, Willie, passed away, and was interred in the crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. The President was consumed by grief, and had been known to go into the...
Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a book collection of 15 poems. The book and thus the poems were written between the years 1914 and 1919, before it was published in 1920. Later on, the book has been republished various times, including the...
First published in 1981, Mulberry and Peach is a historical fiction novel by Chinese writer Hualing Nieh. The novel is "set against the background of the Japanese occupation of China, the Communist-Nationalist struggle, the White Terror of Taiwan,...
Bound Feet and Western Dress is a memoir written by Pang-Mei Chang about her aunt, Chang Yu-i. Both of these characters are women, and Chang writes about the hardships of being a woman in China today and during the time of her aunt. One of those...
Bernard Malamud likely was best known for his novel The Natural before the Robert Redford film adaptation hit movie screens. Since then, The Natural is almost certainly the author’s most famous work of fiction. Despite the fact that his...
Nadja is a French novel written by the French author named André Breton. It is written in a genre called “surrealist narration” and is often pictured as the leading catalyst novel in the surrealist movement in France. The book was first published...
Released in 2004, Gail Jones' Sixty Lights tells the story of a woman named Lucy Strange. In the novel, she is growing up in Victorian Australia and England and is fascinated by new photographic technology, which she uses to take beautiful...
Chocolat is a cinematically renowned drama, based on the book of the same name by Joanne Harris. The movie was releases on December 15, 2000, by Miramax films, and was directed by Lasse Hallström. The movie tells the story of Vianne Rocher, and...
Primo Levi's first books about his experiences through the Holocaust were autobiographical and subjective; in this, his last book, he tries to take a more analytical approach and the book is written in the style of a philosophy treatise or...