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.
Zee Edgell is a Fawcett Society Book Prize winning author, and received this accolade in 1982 after the publication of Beka Lamb. Not only was it Edgell's first novel to earn international recognition, it was also the first novel by any Belizean...
David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), loosely based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was nominated for a miraculous thirteen Academy Awards, winning three - Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best...
Heartland is a memoir by writer Sarah Smarsh to be published on September 18, 2018. Set in 1980's and 1990's Kansas, the book follow the story of young Smarsh, daughter of a poor wheat farmer. With themes of America's continuously changing...
Robert Graves is considered one of England's pre-eminent war poets - one of a group of young men whose poetry written in the trenches of France during World War One came to symbolize the awfulness of the conditions that they were sent to fight in,...
In 1938, George Orwell published Homage to Catalonia, an autobiographical novel that detailed his participation and experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The war was fought between the left-leaning Republicans, who were forged in an alliance with...
Darkness at Noon is the best-known work of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler. It was published in 1940 during World War Two and speaks far louder about Koestler's feelings of disgruntlement and disillusionment with the Russian...
Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1937. Throughout her career, she has published 14 individual novels, as well as two collections of short stories. Godwin was raised in North Carolina, where she gradually picked...
Published in 1854, The Lamplighter is realistic fiction novel by American novelist Maria Cummins. The novel takes on a sentimental point of view, with themes that try to persuade the reader towards the righteous path of being kind towards...
The Journal of John Woolman is one of the most successful and widely read; in fact, since it's first printing in 1774, it has never been out of print. So, who exactly was John Woolman?
Born in 1720, Woolman was an American merchant, journalist and...
About a Mountain is an essay-like book-length narrative published in 2010 by American author-essayist John D’Agata. At 240 pages long, D’Agata tells the story of himself in Las Vegas, following a case of a nuclear-waste storage plan by the...
It is not entirely clear on which day Aphra Behn was born, but we know that she was baptized on December 14th, 1640, in the little church that sat quietly in the shade of Canterbury Cathedral in the south of England where she was born. One of the...
It would be easy to credit Walt Disney with making Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea an adventurous cultural phenomenon, but in fact, credit should actually go to French author Jules Verne, whose penned this futuristic novel in 1870, almost...
To this day, scholars are unsure why Kant wrote this text, and bicker constantly about Kant's intentions when he wrote it, and his inspiration for doing so. What they can agree on, however, is that it was the most influential writings on the...
Hegel believed that history follows the dictates of reason - in other words, history is fluid, interpretive, and written retrospectively according to how we understand the facts as we see them. Hegel makes history into more of a science than an...
To read the beginning of the Feminist Manifesto, one could close one's eyes and believe oneself to be in the middle of the Women's March, or at the very least, burning bra after bra as the sexual revolution inspired women everywhere to demand...
If Cher's nineteen seventies hit "Half Breed" were a novel, this would be it; like the song, it tells the story of a protagonist on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with never quite fitting in with either their Native American or their white...
'The Secret Lion' is a well-known published text written by American author Alberto Alvaro Rios. It is narrated from the position of a mnemonic adult but with a child's eye and voice, which gives the story a good deal of humor and wit. Through...
2011 McArthur Fellow Alicia Elizabeth Stallings is an American poet, and also a renowned translator of the poems of others. From an early age, Stallings was captivated by classical civilizations and studied Classics at the University of Georgia...
Most poets credit philosophies, natural beauty, and all things esoteric as their inspiration, but Vijay Seshadri credits his influences as American poetry heavyweights Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Seshadri is an American poet and essayist of...
The Giving Tree is a children's illustrated book, written by Shel Silverstein, and published on in 1964 by Harper & Row. The book was widely acclaimed for dealing with mature themes and conveying a deep moral of sacrifice and unrequited love.
...Goodnight Moon was written by Margaret Wise Brown with illustrations by Clement Hurd and published in 1947. Although today considered a classic of children’s literature that is more likely than not to be found in a home with a pre-school child as...
The City of Embers, written by Jeanne DuPrau, is the first in the eponymous series, and was published in 2003 under the genre of children's science-fiction. The book was followed by three sequels and a comic book to follow in 2012, illustrated by...
Moon Over Manifest is children’s novel based on real historical events that happened in The United States. It is the first book written by Clare Vanderpool and was published on May 2, 1995. The story centers around a young girl named Abilene, and...
Ramona Quimby has a vivid imagination and alot of spunk, which sometimes earns her the rather unfair reputation of being a bit of a pest. Of course, she doesn't mean to be a pest. Circumstances conspire with each other to make her seem that way....