Newest Study Guides

Hollow City is a second book, a continuation of the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children saga. It is an adventure fantasy novel that follows a group of peculiar children running away from wights-evil peculiars who are after their...

Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. As a teenager, she was heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, inspiring her to become an avid reader and writer. Her other...

A Hologram for the King is a 2012 fiction novel by the acclaimed American novelist Dave Eggers. This book was first published in 2012 by McSweeney's, an independent publishing company that was founded by Eggers himself. The novel follows the story...

The Declaration of Independence, the republican form of government outlined in the United States Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, the most illustrious statesmen of America's Revolutionary generation, were all products of the Founding...

Unlike many other works of dystopian science fiction, The Circle is set in a very near future, fitting neatly into the early 21st-century United States sociopolitical world of Google, Wikileaks, big data, and personalized advertisement.

The...

Published in 2009, The Help tells the story of three women who work together to challenge the racial status quo of their day. In Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s, aspiring writer Skeeter Phelan gets a dangerous idea: to write a book about what...

The Street of Crocodiles was written by Bruno Schulz and is a collection of short stories. It was published in 1934, but in Polish. Celina Wisniewska translated the stories into English quite a while later, in 1963. Schulz had trouble publishing...

David Grossman is an Israeli novelist born on January 25, 1954 in Jerusalem, Israel. He grew up with limited means as his father was a librarian. However, it is because of his father that Grossman developed a love for reading and literature. As a...

The Namesake is the first novel by author Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in the UK to Bengali parents and then moved to the USA as a small child. Like her collection of short stories published in 1999, Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake focuses on...

Dee Brown was an American novelist born on February 28, 1908 in Alberta, Louisiana. He was an avid reader as a child and the book History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was particularly influential in developing...

Published in 1960, The Cricket in Times Square is a children's book that tells the story of a cricket from Connecticut who accidentally comes to New York City after getting stuck on a commuter train. It was written by George Selden and illustrated...

Around the World in Eighty Days is an adventure novel written by renowned French author Jules Verne, published in 1873. It tells the story of Phileas Fogg, a resident of London, who makes a bet with the members of his club that he can...

Allegiant, published in 2013, is the third book in the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. The first two books in the series are titled Divergent and Insurgent. The series has been highly acclaimed and is well-regarded in the Young Adult genre. It...

The Blithedale Romance is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s third novel, one that is sometimes overlooked by readers but is nonetheless considered one of his most critically important works. Hawthorne wrote the novel in 1851 while staying at Horace Mann’s...

Paper Towns is John Green's third novel, published in 2008. It deals with similar elements of his previous works, including the presence of a beautiful yet eccentric female and a gawky, uncertain male. It is compared to his 2005 novel Looking for...

The Watsons Go to Birmingham was the first of Curtis's novels, and is arguably the one he is most remembered for. It was published by Yearling in 1995 and was written primarily for middle-grade readers, typically ages 10 to 13. This novel tells...

Comparable to the Odyssey or the Bible, the Ramayana is a classic of world literature. The poem details the adventures of Prince Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, along with his devoted wife Sita and his dear brother Lakshmana. Written in...

How To Read English Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, published by HarperCollins in 2003, was well-received by audiences, and continues to enjoy a place on the New York Times bestseller list for...

Cannery Row (1945) is one of John Steinbeck's most beloved novels. Its mixture of tones and themes, memorable characters, and ability to capture and convey the essence of a place in time has made it a favorite of both readers and critics alike.

...

An Essay Upon Projects was the very first work of literature to which Daniel Defoe publicly signed his name as author. Lacking neither ambition nor audaciousness, the essays lays out over the court of more 50,000 words a detailed and comprehensive...

The Way of the World premiered in 1700 at London's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Field, performed by Majesty's Servants, an acting company of the time. Though it is now regarded as one of the best Restoration comedies in existence, it was not well...

Up from Slavery is the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, one of the most prominent black leaders of the post-civil War era. Originally published in Outlook magazine in serial form, it was translated into 18 languages and is one of the...

One of the three novels by Yasunari Kawabata that the Nobel Committee cited in awarding him the Nobel Literature Prize in 1968, Snow Country is one of the famous writer's best and most well known works. Set in a remote hot spring town in the "snow...

Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is famous not just for its amusing, allegorical content, but also because it has the distinction of being the only surviving Roman novel in its entirety. It was published in the 2nd century CE and has endured as a classic...