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.
Although British author is best-known for his novels, he wrote countless short stories. But Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (originally published in 1983) feature none of Dahl's short stories. Instead, Dahl collected 14 of what he considered to...
Although he is best-known for his novels, Roald Dahl wrote dozens of poems. Quite a few of his poems are collected in Dirty Beasts (published in 1983), and all of those poems deal with, as the publisher says, "unsuspecting animals."
In one poem...
One of acclaimed British author Roald Dahl's books written for adults, My Uncle Oswald (originally published in 1979), tells the story of the eponymous Uncle Oswald, who one day discovers that the so-called "Sudanese Blister Beetle" has tremendous...
The Enormous Crocodile (originally published in 1978) is one of famed British author Roald Dahl's many books for children. It tells the story of the eponymous Enormous Crocodile, who is almost always hungry. To satiate that desire, the enormous...
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More is a collection of short stories written by notable children’s author, Roald Dahl. The book was published in 1977 by publishing house, Jonathan Cape. Quentin Blake, frequent collaborator of Dahl’s,...
Boots Riley's directoral debut is a black comedy - drama film with quite a stellar cast, including Forrest Whitaker, Rosario Dawson, Patton Oswalt and Danny Glover. The movie tells the story of a young black telemarketer who decides to speak with...
“A Wagner Matinee” was first published in the February 1904 edition of Everybody’s Magazine, a nonfiction and fiction magazine founded in 1899 by Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. Cather had a lifelong passion for Wagner's music, and many of...
The title Switch Bitch (originally published in 1974) is likely to surprise bibliophiles and general audiences alike, for British author Roald Dahl is best-known for his children's books like The BFG. To that end, Switch Bitch is a collection of...
Kiss Kiss is the third collection of short stories published by legendary children’s author Roald Dahl. Like his first two collections, however, these are not stories intended for children, but rather have come to represent the iconic and...
Originally published in 1953, Someone Like You is famed British author Roald Dahl's collection of short stories. Dahl opined that the collection is for adults, and adults alone. Someone Like You includes eighteen short stories ,some of which were...
Some Time Never signals a major change for famed British author Roald Dahl. Well-known for his children's books (like The BFG), Some Time Never marks Dahl's first foray into adult literature. It tells the story of a group called the Gremlins, who...
Based on the James Ellroy novel of the same name, L.A. Confidential (1997) tells the story of three Los Angeles police officers (Jack Vincennes, played by Kevin Spacey; Bud White, played by Russell Crowe; Edmund Exley, played by Guy Pearce) who...
Written by Irish novelist Anne Enright, The Gathering (originally published in 2007), tells the story of a rather large Irish family who one day gathers for the funeral of a man called Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic who died by his own hand. The...
Although she's not especially well-known out of academic circles, American poet Ruth Forman has written countless classic poems, the vast majority of which talks about issues like spirituality and religion, love and romance, challenge, and grace....
In many ways, David Sedaris' 2000 collection of short stories is all about the concept of fitting in, and of how one does not necessarily need to speak the language of a place in order to fit in there. That said, much of the second part of the...
Published in 1846, The German Ideology is Marx and Engels’s first public attempt to outline the basics of Marxist theory as we now understand it. Here we find both the familiar political polemics around class warfare and proletarian revolution,...
Charles Dickens' ghost story "The Signalman" is about an unnamed narrator who takes an interest in a railway signal operator who is haunted by a specter. The specter's ambiguous warnings lead to the signalman being run over by a train.
First...
A Tempest, written in 1968, is Aimé Césaire's postcolonial adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. It follows the actions of the Shakespeare play, but makes the relation between Prospero and his fairy slaves, Ariel and Caliban, that of a...
A Little Princess is a children’s novel written by the English-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett. Published in 1905 as an adaptation of Burnett's serialized novel Sara Crewe, it is considered a classic of English-language children's...
Wonder, a story about a ten-year-old boy who lives in Manhattan and who has a rare physical deformity, was published in February of 2012 and was author R.J. Palacio's first novel.
Palacio was inspired to write Wonder after taking her son to buy...
There is a long-running debate about whether or not song lyrics can be poems (and vice versa). In many respects, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (among other songs) proved that song lyrics can be a poem. In fact, it is considered both a...
Written by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1957) tells the metaphorical story (the book is a metaphor for independence) of a young boy named Cosimo di Rondó who climbs up a tree intending to spend the rest of his life...
The Ghost Bride is a critically-acclaimed novel by breakout Malaysian novelist Yangsze Choo first published by William Morrow in 2013. Set in 19th-century Malaya under British colonial rule, The Ghost Bride explores themes of tradition, love, and...
The publisher-approved synopsis of Five Days (originally published in 2020) says that it is "A kaleidescopic account of five days in the life of a city on the edge." And that's certainly the truth. It tells the story of seven characters who...