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.
Kathleen Winter is a novelist and short story writer who was born in 1960 in the north of England. One of her most prominent works, Annabel, was published in 2010 and is regarded as a daring and pathbreaking novel.
This novel was published by...
Firebird is a memoir by American poet Mark Doty. The memoir takes place mostly in the 1960s and covers Doty's life from ages six to sixteen, which he spent in Tennessee, Arizona, and other parts of the American South.
Firebird has been regarded as...
Like so much of Augusta Webster’s life, her 1878 collection of essays originally published in the Examiner sports a title that is a combination of the dramatic and ironic. The year of publication gives away the fact that this is a work of the...
Published posthumously, Moments of Being is a fragmented and disjointed collection of autobiographical sketches that is curiously close to the fundamental spirit of Woolf's experiments in stream-of-consciousness fiction. One way of approaching...
The Fishermen is a 2015 novel by Chigozie Obioma, an American Nigerian writer who is currently working at the University of Michigan. The fictional book is set in his native hometown, Akure, Nigeria during the 1990's.
The Fishermen chronicles the...
The Young Musician is a novel written by Horatio Alger. Alger was an American author who lived in the 1800s. He wrote many, many works, over a hundred books, about how success can be attained through honesty, virtue, and hard work. Even though his...
The first place to begin with an introduction to the Diary of the Samuel Pepys often seems to be with that strange last name. While it does not really matter much to the lone reader traversing across England’s geographical and historical landscape...
A prodigious French poet of Christian and Lebanese descent, Andree Chedid was a writer who questioned humanity, individuality, and the interconnected ties that bond a person to the rest of the world. Her 1983 novel, From Sleep Unbound, is a work...
In 2002, one of the most influential dramatists of the second half of the 20th century returned with great controversy to the Broadway stage. The playwright was Edward Albee—writer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and the play was titled The...
A Gesture Life is a highly acclaimed novel written by Chang-Rae Lee, who won the Asian American Literary Award for it. It is about a man named Doc Hata, who was a medic in WWII in a Japanese soldiers' camp, and his struggles to come to terms with...
Most people are familiar with Farewell, My Concubine as a result of the 1993 film adaptation which is considered a revolutionary moment in time for Chinese (Hong Kong) cinema. The film was released coincident with the first English translation of...
The Hour of the Star (1977) is Brazilian author Clarice Lispector's novel which was released posthumously and tells the story, in the words of the author, "the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs." While this description...
A novella, Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad’s most famous work and a foundational text on the subject of colonialism. Heart of Darkness is based in part on a trip that Conrad took through modern-day Congo during his years as a sailor. He...
The essential writings of Jacques Lacan are primarily concerned with his seminal development of the “mirror stage” of psychology. Lacan’s introduction of that psychological concept is steeped in the inescapable fact that we all create an illusory...
Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms is a collection of Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings, all done during the first half of the 1800s. Many of the writings are selected from Schopenhauer’s last publication, Parerga and Paralipomena, which was...
What if Albert Einstein had developed his Theory of Relativity when he was younger? Or Charles Darwin had been a mere schoolkid trying to convince his fellow students of the viability of the evolution of species? The mockery would never have ended...
‘night, Mother is Marsha Norman’s fifth produced play and was composed in 1981 before premiering in 1983. That same year would see Norman honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for a work often considered one of the darkest stories to ever earn...
Amina Gautier is an American novelist and essayist born in 1977 in New York City. An African-American and Puerto Rican woman, Gautier says that her heritage was a heavy influence on her growing up. She attended Prep for Prep in her teenage years,...
Girl in Translation is a novel written by Jean Kwok and published in 2010. About a Chinese-American immigrant girl and her struggle to fit between dual cultures, the book became a New York Times bestseller.
The protagonist of the novel is a girl...
Sweetness in the Belly is a novel written by Camilla Gibb. It was published in 2005 and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Camilla Gibb lives in Canada and has written a few books that have been well received internationally. She has a...
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, by Tom Perrotta, is a collection of short stories about a young boy named Buddy who has unsettling memories of New Jersey during the 1970s. This book explores classic 70s themes relating to parents, sports,...
The Couple Next Door is a 2016 thriller novel by Shari Lapena, a former lawyer and English teacher turned acclaimed writer. Fast-paced and gripping, it involves a strange abduction, characters hiding dark secrets, and a riveting twist that make...
The Reader is a novel that was originally written in German in 1995 by author and law professor Bernard Schlink. In 1996 it was translated into English and published worldwide, becoming an instant best-seller. The novel was controversial as it...
Osip Emil’evich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw when it was still part of the Russian empire in 1891. Efforts to escape rampant anti-Semitism eventually moved Mandelstam to St. Petersburg and living in the heart of the Russian empire eventually him...