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.
"To Da-duh, in Memoriam" is Paule Marshall's short story, first published in 1967 but popularized by Marshall's collection Reena, and Other Stories, which was published in 1983. The short story is autobiographical in nature; it chronicles the...
After HarperCollins emerged victorious in its heated battle to publish R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War (2018), they moved quickly to publish the novel, which they thought would be an overnight success. The novel, which is set in 20th-century China,...
Over his long and illustrious career, Stephen King has written countless classic horror novels. One of those classic novels is Misery, which was published by Viking in 1987. At the center of the novel is the relationship between novelist Paul...
Father Comes Home from the Wars is award-winning author Suzan-Lori Parks' play about a young enslaved man during Civil War times. Published in three parts in 2014, Parks' play follows Homer, a slave who is given an opportunity to escape bondage....
Author Katherine Mansfield's short story "A Cup of Tea" was first published in May 1922 as a part of pulp British magazine. The short story, which tells the story of a young woman named Rosemary Fell, was based on the author's own life. Rosemary...
The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited publishers under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, for Sylvia Plath questioned the literary value of the novel and did not believe that it was a "serious work."...
"The Necklace and Other Stories" is a collection of stories written by Maupassant in the 1870s and 1880s, first published in French (mostly in magazines) and later published in collected volumes and translated into a number of foreign languages....
British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was published by Faber and Faber in 2021. As with many of Ishiguro's novel, Klara and the Sun imagines a future in which humans live in a dystopia. Here, children are genetically engineered and...
Canadian author Alice Munro is perhaps best-known for her short stories. Through her long and illustrious career, which came to an end in May of 2024 when she died at the age of 92, Munro wrote many short stories about the human condition. Several...
Author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's idea for Random Family, which was published in 2003 by Scribner, was born out of her article for Newsday about the trial of an infamous heroin dealer named "Boy George," who became so wildly successful that many...
Along with Christopher Isherwood, British author Alan Hollinghurst is best known for brining gay literature into the mainstream. His most famous novel, The Line of Beauty, which was published in 2004, did just that for people across the world....
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an ethnographic study written by anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes. It was published on 10th June 2013 by University of California Press. The book looks into the lives of migrant farmworkers from Mexico,...
“The Subjection of Women,” one of Mill’s most renowned essays, was published in 1869, and stands as one of the 19th century’s strongest calls for gender equality. In this essay, Mill argues that the inferior political status of women in comparison...
The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth) as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the Grammarian. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570. In it, the...
The Eyes and the Impossible is a middle-grade novel written by American writer Dave Eggers. It explores themes of friendship, freedom, and the natural world. This book, illustrated by Shawn Harris, was published in 2023 and has since received...
Five Little Indians is a historical fiction novel by Cree writer Michelle Good. HarperCollins published it in April 2020. The novel received several accolades including the Governor General’s Literary Award. Good developed the novel while pursuing...
Never Whistle at Night is a horror anthology co-edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst. Hawk is a member of the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe and an emerging voice in Native American literature, while Van Alst is an author and academic of Lakota...
Published in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf, Wandering Stars is a novel written by Tommy Orange. The author is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. Wandering Stars follows his debut novel There There (2018), which garnered widespread...
Kairos is a novel published in German in 2021 by Jenny Erpenbeck. The story became the first written by a German author to win the International Booker Prize which honors both the author and translator of a foreign language book that has been...
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's first and only novel, is a faustian story of a man who trades the purity of his soul for undying youth. It was written in 1889 and first published in the literary magazine Lippincott's Monthly in July,...
Ama Ata Aidoo published Our Sister Killjoy in 1979. Though a novel, it reflected her own experiences abroad. She explained in an interview, “I created [Sissie], it’s inevitable that a certain part of me will be reflected in her. But it is not an...
Thomas Hardy was an influential British writer and poet whose work focuses on rural life, class distinctions and conflict, and the shared human experiences of love and disappointment. “Neutral Tones,” written in 1867 and originally published in...
Amber McBride's Me (Moth) (2021) is a young-adult verse novel about Moth, a teenage girl who struggles with the grief of losing her family in a car crash. When Moth meets a boy named Sani, the two instantly connect through their shared pain and...
