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.
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy has a title true to its promise. In a manner not dissimilar to John Dos Passos’ monument trilogy U.S.A, Auster’s definitive work is actually composed of three separate and distinct novel: City of Glass, Ghosts...
Chanda's Secrets is a book written by Allan Stratton which was published in 2004. The book revolves around the character of Chanda, who is a 16 year old girl. Chanda's younger sister, Sarah dies and this brings immense grief to her family....
The Book of Negroes, also known as Someone Knows My Name, is a novel written by author Lawrence Hill, which was originally published during 2007. It was later published during 2015 by W. W. Norton Company. This novel tells the story of protagonist...
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is a novel written by James De Mille. It is his most famous and most well read book. After De Mille passed away, Harper’s Weekly published the work in a series and then in 1888, it was published in...
Kate Millet, author of Sexual Politics, wrote of Villette that it was "too subversive to be popular." Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë's friend and her first biographer, said that the story of Villette was not as interesting as that of Jane Eyre....
Published in 2008, Unaccustomed Earth is Jhumpa Lahiri’s second collection of short stories. Characteristic of Lahiri’s work, Unaccustomed Earth explores the Indian American characters’ lives and culturally mixed society. It won the 2008 Frank...
Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was first published in 1943. By 1945 it had already been adapted into a very successful movie. Then, by 1952, the story was transformed into a hit musical on Broadway. What was the reason for such...
Shadows was John Cassavetes' directorial debut. The idea for the film grew out of an improvisation from a class he was teaching at his drama school, "The Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop." It involved a young African-American woman who was very...
The Mill on the Floss was George Eliot’s third book, after Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859). She began writing the novel in 1859 and it was first published in 1860, with a few subsequent revised editions. The novel was eagerly...
Fight Club is a Twentieth Century Fox production shot in 1998 and released in the United States in 1999. The film is based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk of the same name. The rights to the novel were acquired by producer Laura Ziskin for $10,000...
The short story “The Most Dangerous Game” was originally published in Collier’s Weekly on January 19, 1924. The story has also been published as “The Hounds of Zaroff.” The main premise of the tale has been adapted numerous times to film and...
The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is a careful, thorough, and brilliant criticism of the mercantile system that governed economic policy in Great Britain during Smith's life. Smith charts the evolution of mercantile principles from the...
Characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as the most unpretentious masterpiece of the American literary tradition, The Dollmaker is a novel by Harriete Arnow that was published in 1954 and proved to be a pathbreaking novel. This novel was nominated for...
Fly Away Peter is a book written by David Malouf in 1982. The book mainly revolves around the story of Jim Saddler who has an advanced understanding of the bird life of an estuary near his home. A man called Ashley Crowther inherits the farm which...
Angela Carter is an English novelist born on May 7, 1940 in Eastbourne, England. As a child, she was raised in a family that valued art and literature. Her father was a journalist, and she followed in his footsteps by writing for the Croydon...
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, is often referred to as the founding text or manifesto of Western feminism. Nineteenth-century American feminists revered its author as their founding mother and read and...
The Book of Daniel was published in 1971 when Doctorow was a Visiting Author at the University of California, Irvine.
Doctorow conceived of the idea for the novel in the late 1960s - an era of intense conflicts over Vietnam, the Civil Rights...
Published in 2005, The Secret River is the first book in a trilogy by Kate Grenville that tackles the morally complex history of the colonization of Australia. The Secret River emerged out Grenville's research into her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman,...
Initially transcribed sometime around 1164, Erec and Enide is not just the first of the great Chivalric Romances by Chretien de Troyes, it is one of the earliest poems about King Arthur and is usually regarded as the first Arthurian work to...
Lone Star is a richly layered ensemble piece featuring a complex plot and complicated characters written and directed by John Sayles. The convoluted plot is a murder mystery in which much darker elements of political corruption are slowly revealed...
The Unredeemed Captive is a novel written by John Putnam Demos that was published in 2011. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Francis Parkman Prize. Demos is also a historian in addition to being an author, and he has won the...
Jennifer Finney Boylan is an American novelist and activist born on June 22, 1958 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Although Boylan was born a biological male, she felt as though her natural body did not fit her true personality. It was a gnawing...
Dalton Conley was born in 1969 to income-poor parents (from middle class backgrounds) who had moved to New York's Lower East Side before the spike in drugs and crime during the following decade. The neighbourhood was poverty striken, and, with the...