Newest Study Guides

Station Eleven is a critically acclaimed 2015 novel by up-and-coming author Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven was a National Book Award Finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist. The novel was listed as one of the best books of the year by...

J. M. Coetzee retells a familiar story in Foe yet challenges that very familiarity. Even people who have never read the novel Robinson Crusoe are relatively well acquainted with its iconic portrait of survival after a shipwreck, as well as with...

The original winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize before the award was refused by the author, Arrowsmith is a 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The book covers the topic of science culture, specifically the medical field, during the period.

The...

While Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are both far better known, a sizable contingent of scholars and critics regard the masterpiece of Joseph Conrad’s fecund writing career to be the novel Nostromo. Among its admirers is the author of The Great...

Njal's Saga is the longest and the most revered of the forty family sagas written in Iceland between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The events of the saga come from several different sources, including oral tales, The Book of Settlements...

If the correspondence was useful for no other purpose alone, reading the letters which passed between John Adams and his wife Abigail might qualify as the smoking gun in a trial to convict social media of killing the fine art of political...

Perhaps more famous for novels like Women in Love and short stories like “The Rocking Horse Winner” D.H. Lawrence is also a major figure in British poetry. Lawrence was highly influenced by the American poet Walt Whitman and, in fact, would often...

Tom and Viv is a movie directed by Brian Gilbert and adapted from a stage play of the same name by Michael Hastings. Hastings also co-wrote the screenplay with Adrian Hodges. It tells the story of the relationship between poet T.S. (Tom) Eliot...

The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost Stories is a compendium of horror stories by the celebrated writer Ambrose Bierce, renowned for his eerie tales of the American countryside and his biting wit. HP Lovecraft wrote of Ambrose Bierce, "Virtually all...

"The Snow Man" is one of modernist master Wallace Stevens' most acclaimed poems, and it is also one of his earliest. Originally published in the October 1921 issue of Poetry magazine, it then appeared in Stevens' first full-length collection, ...

A narrative of loss, struggle, and redemption in the wake of World War II, Ceremony (1977) ranks among the defining works of Native-American poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. Although Ceremony is normally classified as a novel, the text is in...

Arthur Conan Doyle published The Valley of Fear in serial form in Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. A book form followed the British serialization in 1915. The manuscript, 176 folio pages with Doyle’s deletions and revisions,...

Ever wonder what happens when an author passes away before his or her next book is completed? Z for Zachariah is one answer to that question. Author Robert C. O’Brien is probably most famous for his Newberry Award-winning classic Mrs. Frisby and...

Matilda is a novel written by the famed children’s author Roald Dahl. It was first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape in London. The book was illustrated by Dahl’s frequent collaborator Quentin Blake. It has been made into an audiobook, a feature...

Dracula. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Jane Eyre, The Fall of the House of Usher, Rebecca, and The Haunting of Hill House. That Hound of the Baskervilles scaring people out on the moors. Tim Burton’s career. Joy Division and New Order. All of these...

My Children! My Africa! is a two-act play written by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright who has written over 30 plays. There are only three characters in the play: a white South African teenage girl, a black South African teenage boy,...

News from Nowhere is a utopian novel written by British author William Morris. Morris was a founding member of the Socialist League, an organization founded in 1885 on the tenets of socialism, a political and economic ideology that advocates for...

Waiting for the Barbarians is a political allegory about the paranoia at the roots of imperial narratives and the blood lust of colonial violence. Written during the apartheid era in South Africa, the novel is a heart of darkness fable, reflecting...

If you did not know that this novel is a work of fiction you might find yourself googling the Madison High School shooting of April 22nd. This is the genius of Walter Dean Myers who was so disturbed by the Columbine High School shooting in 1999...

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) composed 'Anecdote of the Jar' in 1918 and it was published a year later. 'Anecdote of the Jar' by Wallace Stevens is a descriptive lyric. The poem mirrors the creative soul of the time in which it was composed.

What...

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book written by James W. Loewen. It was first published in 1995 and then republished in 2008. It tells the story of how history is taught in the United States, revealing how the many inaccuracies, omissions, and biases...

“The Interlopers” first appeared in the magazine The Bystander in 1912 and again in The Toys of Peace and Other Papers (1919), a collection of short stories published posthumously and compiled by Saki’s friend, Rothay Reynolds. The story features...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by playwright Jack Thorne, directed by John Tiffany, and based on an original story by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The story begins nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts in the...

It is hard to overstate the impact of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. It is a canonical text not only in French literature and modernism, but in the history of European art. It influenced innumerable poets, novelists, artists, and critics in...