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.
Boy: Tales of Childhood is an autobiographical book by children’s author Roald Dahl. Published in 1984, the book focuses on Dahl's memories from his childhood and adolescence in Wales, England, and Norway in the 1920s and 1930s. The story begins...
I, Being born a Woman and Distressed is a 1923 sonnet by playwright and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in which a woman describes her simultaneous desire for and dislike of an unidentified addressee. The poem was first...
"I taste a liquor never brewed" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1860 and first published in 1861. It appeared, anonymously and with major alterations, in the Springfield Republican and was one of the few poems published in Dickinson's...
"Pity Me Not (Sonnet 29)" is a 1923 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay in which a speaker attempts to come to terms with a recent heartbreak.
Millay's speaker repeats the phrase "Pity me not" in an attempt to reframe romantic troubles as natural,...
Every Day, published in 2012, is a Young Adult novel by David Levithan. The novel tells the story of A, a disembodied spirit who wakes up in the body of a different person each day. A has no control over the gender, race, location, or appearance...
The Cay is a young-adult novel by American author Theodore Langhans Taylor. It was dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. who was assassinated a year before the release. Published in 1969 by Avon Publications, it was followed by Timothy of the Cay,...
Super Pumped is a book by a journalist Mike Isaac, and it is a biographical recollection of events that led to the founding of the American public service company Uber. The main theme of the book is the theme of "rise and grind" culture.
The book...
Funny Boy is the first novel published by openly gay Sri Lankan writer Shyam Selvadurai. Of mixed Tamil and Sinhala heritage, Selvadurai joined his family in their decision to immigrate to Canada in 1983 in the wake of rioting stimulated partly by...
Motorcycles and Sweetgrass is a novel by the Canadian author Drew Hayden. The novel follows a Native American teenager Virgil whose world is suddenly turned upside down when a white motorcycle-riding man enters his home and life as if he was a...
Samson Agonistes is a closet drama published in 1671 by English poet and political activist John Milton. It appeared alongside Milton's Paradise Regained, a poem that follows his most famous work, the epic Paradise Lost. Milton declared Samson...
"No, Thank You, John" is an 1862 poem by the English writer Christina Rossetti in which a woman addresses and negotiates with a man who continues to pursue her despite her rejections. It was originally published in Rossetti's collection Goblin...
Frank Herbert’s Dune is a science fiction novel about Paul Atreides, the 15-year-old son of Duke Leto who travels to the desert planet Arrakis. After House Atreides is overthrown, Paul becomes a messiah-like figure to the native people of Arrakis,...
Scythe (2016) by Neal Shusterman is the first book in the New York Times–bestselling Arc of a Scythe series. It is set in a distant future where advances in technology have rendered death by natural causes obsolete, and where society is organized...
"The Way Up to Heaven" is a short story by Roald Dahl, penned in 1954 for The New Yorker magazine. It was later included in a volume of short stories published in 1960, entitled Kiss Kiss. While Dahl's work has a reputation for dark imagery and...
Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network is a 2010 drama film loosely based on controversies surrounding the creation of Facebook.
In the fall of 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is an intelligent but arrogant Harvard sophomore. When...
"Cousin Kate" is a mid-nineteenth-century poem by Christina Rossetti, in which a suffering woman tells the tale of her subjugation at the hands of a powerful lord and her betrayal by a cousin. Throughout the work, Rossetti plays with readers'...
"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1865 and first published in 1866. It is one of the few poems that was published, anonymously, in Dickinson's lifetime by a contemporary literary magazine. Born in 1830,...
Judith Wright is considered one of the most notable Australian poets in the country’s history, revered for her cerebral and evocative poems that explore the complexity of Australia’s natural landscape and its colonization by Europeans. Michael...
"American Animals" is a documentary film written and directed by Bart Layton. The film tells the story of a book theft that occurred at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004. Spencer Reinhard, an art student fascinated by rare...
A fourteen-volume epic, The Prelude is William Wordsworth's account of his own life and growth as a poet, published in various editions between 1799 and 1850. Intended to be the forerunner to another epic work entitled The Recluse, this work is...
The Tale of Sinuhe (or The Story of Sinuhe) is an Ancient Egyptian text composed around 1875 BC. Concerning the life of a fictional man who flees Egypt and becomes a hero abroad, it is one of the earliest known literary texts.
Translated from...
In the field of Bengali letters, Mahasweta Devi is an important figure, castigating political authorities for exploiting the poor and underprivileged and criticizing the literary establishment for failing to raise their voices against social...
Originally published in 1891, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" is a poem by Emily Dickinson. In her lifetime, Dickinson was mostly known as something of recluse, rarely leaving her town or home. Her work was only published after her death in...
Killing Floor by Lee Child is a first-person point of view debut novel detailing the story of Jack Reacher. Jack is an ex-military man whose job gets terminated due to anomalous peace in Georgia. The military intelligence along with his background...