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.
The Dutch House is a novel by Ann Patchett, published in 2019. It tells the story of two siblings, Danny and Maeve Conroy, and how their abandonment as children leaves them reliant on each other.
The fictional Dutch House of the title is located...
Written by Unca Eliza Winkfield (likely a pseudonym; the real of name of the author is still not known), The Female American (originally published in 1767) tells the story of a half-Native American, half-English woman who is marooned on an island...
If one were instructed to construct a list of the five most famous playwrights, Irish writer Samuel Beckett would almost certainly be included in most of those lists. His most famous works were written between World War II and the decade of 1960....
Written by multi-talented author Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (originally published in 2010) combines prose, graphic art (images), elements of plays, and philosophy to tell the story of the American Civil Rights Movement. The book begins in 1968,...
In what is yet another adaption of William Shakespeare's classic play Hamlet, director Gregory Doran's 2009 film Hamlet is a filmed modern-dress adaption of the famed play. Hamlet tells the story of the eponymous Prince Hamlet (played in the film...
Le Grand Meaulnes (translated to The Lost Estate in English) is French author's Alain-Fournier's one and only novel published 1913, just a year before his death on the battlefields of World War I. It tells the semi-biographical tale of a young man...
James Baxter is a New Zealand-born poet and playwright responsible for some of the countries best - and most famous - poems and plays. Among his many famous works is the poem "The Bad Young Man," which tells the simple yet profound story of a...
Isabella Whitney is thought of as the first professional female poet and writer in England, where she lived during the late 1550s. She is attributed as being the first Englishwoman to have written and published her own unreligious poetry. Whitney...
Written by Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir (originally published in 1998), tells the story of Elizabeth's life and her Jewish religious upbringing. Initially, she was put off by her religion and didn't really appreciate her past and...
Written by Latino LGBTQ+ writer Rigoberto Gonzalez, Red-Inked Retablos (originally released in 2013) is his memoir. Through essays and stories, Gonzalez tells the story of his life - particularly his life in writing and his life in the Chicano...
What would happen to the world if a new bacterial disease appeared in the world that was immune to antibiotics and more deadly than the 1918 Spanish Flu? Or Ebola spread to much of the world? What would the world do? How could we prepare? How...
Written by American author Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer (released in 2000) tells the story of a small town in Appalachia (the United States) and the various people who inhabit it. Particularly, it tells three separate - but connected -...
Lysistrata, a comedy by Athens' greatest comedic writer, Aristophanes, debuted in Athens in the year 411 BCE, around the time when the Peloponnesian War was just beginning. The play itself centers on the beginnings of this war and the efforts of a...
Set in a dystopian near-future Britain, Alan Moore's 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta follows an anarchist revolutionary named V as he seeks vengeance against the former administrators of a concentration camp and topples the country's...
The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The book consists of twelve stories that focus on the lives of Nigerians living in both Africa and in the United States. Many of the stories in the...
Le Pur et l'impur was written in 1932 by French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. It is not a traditional novel in its structure; it consists of different conversations about sex, sexual attraction and gender, and is far less fictional than its...
First performed on the London stage in 1905, Man and Superman is an extraordinary play precisely because it inverts so many of the traditional or expected roles of theater. On its surface, this play, by George Bernard Shaw, is a standard romantic...
Before co-writing the screenplay for The Last Samurai, co-producer and director Edward Zwick and writer Marshall Herskowitz were best known for writing, producing and directing the groundbreaking television drama series thirtysomething. The movie...
There are some films that are almost more famous for one line spoken within them; Rob Reiner's 1992 legal drama, A Few Good Men, is one of those films, Starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore, it was adapted for the big screen by Aaron...
Master Class is a play by critically acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally. It premiered in 1995 at the John Golden Theater in New York City. The play, set in the 1970s, tells a fictional version of opera masterclasses by the real-life opera...
Love! Valour! Compassion! is a play written by Terrence McNally, that was performed in Broadway in 1995 after transferring from a traditional theatre in 1994. The play premiered on 11 October 1994 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where it ran for a...
In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in American schools to be unlawful. Five years later, Tennessee Williams published Sweet Bird of Youth against a backdrop of political change; segregationist Jim Crow laws were...
Writing and drawing are identical gestures made with the hand.
Poet and author Renee Gladman begins her collection of poems, Calamities, by making this statement, and throughout her literary career, Gladman has shown that she likes to fuse...
Set in a World War I dugout from March 18 to March 21, 1918, R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play Journey's End follows Captain Stanhope as he deals with alcoholism and symptoms of PTSD while commanding a group of British army officers in the lead up to...