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.
The novel The Natural was published in 1952 by the American writer Bernard Malamud; it marks the writer’s debut in the literary field and the start of his literary career. While Bernard Malamud published short stories before the novel, The Natural...
In the late 1870's, Friedrich Nietzsche was planning the publishing of his latest philosophical works, a three-part book called Human, All Too Human. The books would be published in three parts, and then in a two-volume release several years...
On December 17, 1996, rebels stormed the Japanese embassy in Peru, taking hundreds hostage in an act of protest against the policies of Peruvian leader Alberto Fujimori. Within days all but 72 of the hostages had been released. Of these 72 people,...
ZZ Packer is an American short fiction writer. She is of African ethnic origin and her most known collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003) is closely connected with the issue of race affiliation. Still it is not the central issue of...
In this 1998 book by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, an unnamed city is beset by an epidemic of the "white sickness," a disease that instantly turns everyone blind. Everyone, that is, except for one woman. The novel follows the story of seven...
Barbara Ehrenreich was already a highly respected figure in the world of journalism before she penned Nickel and Dimed. As she relates in her introduction to the book, the idea of trying out low-wage work in the interest of investigative reportage...
A Thousand Acres is a novel that was published in 1991 that was written by Jane Smiley. The novel is highly acclaimed, having won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In addition,...
The context within which Raymond Chandler unleashed The Big Sleep upon an unsuspecting world of murder mystery devotees may be surprising to some. Although Chandler had established his hard-boiled variety of murder mystery within the world of...
The Dew Breaker is a 2004 novel by Edwidge Danticat which is structured in the form of nine connected stories. Each story is set either in Haiti at the height of the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and his son, Jean-Claude...
Gottfried Leibniz should make the short list for any discussion of true genius. His insights into mathematics helped shape our understanding of Calculus and Physics, and he also wrote extensively about probability, biology, medicine, psychology,...
Artificial Paradises (original French title Les Paradis artificiels) is a non-fiction text published by an author far more famous for his reputation as one of the greatest poets that France ever produced. Charles Baudelaire's 1860 volume, which...
When you set your novel in a California town called Ithaca and you give your characters names like Homer and Ulysses, you had better be making some sort of effort to tie your story in with the ancient myths of yore. Lots of writers have attempted...
Delmore Schwartz first wrote the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" in July 1935, when he was twenty-one years old. The story was first published in the Partisan Review in 1937, in the first issue following the publication's...
Published in 1894, George Moore’s groundbreaking experiment in pushing the boundaries of Naturalism in English-language fiction presents a stark portrait of both how much things have changed in the past century or so and how little things have...
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is a play by Tomson Highway. It was nominated for a Governor General's Award along with nomination for Dora Mavor Moore Awards (presented by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts) including Best New Play...
John Dewey originally published The Public and Its Problems in 1927. The release of a new edition in 1946 added a subtitle—An Essay in Political Enquiry—as well as the addition of an introduction to the original’s short preface. That preface...
Austerlitz was authored by German writer Winfred Georg Maximilian Sebald (W.G. Sebald). This novel tells the story of a young boy, named Jacques Austerlitz, sent to England in 1939 and placed with foster parents. This couple was quick to rid the...
The rise of Christianity from a small pack of wandering nonconformists to worldwide influence has not been kind to the literary traditions of cultures it gobbled up in its determined trek up through Europe in the first millennia. By the 1100s,...
The Autobiography of My Mother, first published in 1996, is a novel written by Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in the capital city of St. John’s, Antigua. She is the author of...
After a career that had produced some of the defining works of the America stage, Tennessee Williams finally wrote what would the last of his plays to be considered a work of distinction appropriately situated alongside A Streetcar Named Desire...
The Magus is the first novel that John Fowles actually penned, although it would only be published after two subsequent efforts were completed. Fowles is perhaps most famous for later writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Anyone who has read that...
Angels and Demons (2000) is a mystery novel by Dan Brown who is well known for literary techniques that are well displayed in Angels and Demons, such as mysterious investigations into conspiracy theories and explorations in corrupt religious...
Isak Dinesen is a pen name of Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke, a Danish author who published under several other pseudonyms over the course of her career. Dinesen was multilingual and translated most of her own works--she wrote ...
The Tin Flute is a novel written by Gabrielle Roy. This work is her first novel, and it was published originally in French in 1945. It was originally named Bonheur D’occasion, which translates into chance, or secondhand happiness.
It was...
