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.
Eugene O’Neill’s famed Mourning Becomes Electra is a complex and tragic play in three parts. Set in New England at the close of the Civil War, it was first published and staged in 1931. The play is based off Aeschylus’s Greek tragedy The Oresteia...
Maya Angelou’s “Alone” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of verse, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. By the time of the book’s publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and...
Directed with true brilliance and care by Robert Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 American film adapted from Harper Lee’s 1960 semi-autobiographical, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. The film stands as one of the few screen...
Tarr is a classic fiction written by Wyndham Lewis and published in 1918. It is considered his first novel. Lewis is an English painter and writer and is known for his Vorticist movement. He was one of the founders of Vorticism, which disagreed...
There Will be Blood is often referred to as a film adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, but it's far from a direct adaptation. The names of the characters in the film do not correspond to those in the book, and the events in the novel that...
Francisco de Quevedo (Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñes Villegas) was born in Madrid, Spain 1580. He died 64 years old in 1645. He was a nobleman, writer and politician. Fracisco de Quevedo is known as one of the most important writers of...
Point Omega is a novella written by American novelist and playwright Don DeLillo. Released in 2010, it is DeLillo's fifteenth published work.
The short book recounts the tale of Richard Elster, a scholar who served in the military to write about...
A Very English Scandal is a non-fiction, true crime novel by John Preston, arts editor and television critic of the Sunday Telegraph. Published in May 2016, it tells the story of the Jeremy Thorpe Affair, a scandal that occurred in the...
Floyd Salas is an American boxer and author of several works of fiction, including What Now My Love. He was born to a Spanish family in 1931. Raised in Denver, Colorado, Salas remarked that he "grew up in a house of books." Identified as a gifted...
Markus Zusak began his career as a successful writer of young adult fiction, but for his fifth novel, Zusak set out to relate the experiences of his parents growing up during World War II for an adult audience. Zusak has said that much of the...
Inanna is an ancient goddess with earliest roots in Mesopatamia. She was worshipped in cults in Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylon as well. Her fame lasted from around 4000 B.C. until 5000 A.D. She is the goddess of love, fertility, and beauty as well...
Director Alex Garland's mind-bending, intellectual sci-fi Annihilation released to controversy. Allegations of whitewashing and studio meddling plagued the film, yet it was a massive critical success -- but did dismally financially.
Nevertheless,...
The Exorcist is the most profitable horror movie of all time, and possibly one of the most disturbing. It was released in 1973, and stars Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller. It was developed from the book of the same name...
Martin Buber’s most influential work, I and Thou, was originally published in German as Ich and Du in 1923 and was translated into English in 1937. It is the foundational text of what has come to be called the philosophy of dialogue. This covers...
The Archaeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s historiographical treatise—his theory of how to study history—and it was first published in French in 1969. It lays out Foucault’s method for doing history, in particular how to assemble and interpret the...
The German Girl is a historical fiction novel written by Armando Lucas Correa. Correa is a Cuban author and journalist, and this novel was first published on October, 2016.
In terms of narrative, The German Girl takes place in two distinct yet...
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. "The New Colossus" is a sonnet written in 1883 by American poet Elizabeth Lazarus, but most people know only this snippet, used to represent the American dream that hundreds of immigrants were...
Alice Walker set to work on a new novel shortly after filing for divorce from her husband in 1976. In the three years since the publication of her short story collection In Love and Trouble, Walker had become a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine,...
The Big Sleep is a 1946 film noir directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as Chandler's iconic hero-detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge. ...
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962 in German. It began as Habermas’s doctoral dissertation. It was a major work, but it was not translated into English in 1989. By that point, Habermas had already systemized...
Six Shooter is a 27 minute 2004 short film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The central actors include Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, and Domhnall Gleeson. McDonagh's film went on to win an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film....
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a play written by English playwright and director Martin McDonagh in 1996. McDonagh was born to an Irish family in London in 1970. Ireland would go on to play a central role in much of McDonagh's work, with several...
Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy to the jazz singer Billie Holiday, who passed away on July 17th, 1959 from cirrhosis of the liver. Holiday was known for her contralto voice, and for her ability to improvise a song on the spot. Her...
Nothing is Janne Teller's first book for young adults, and like her previous books with a more adult leaning, are philosophical adventures that ask more questions than they answer. Nothing, though, has far more in common with William Golding's ...