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.
Over the course of his long and illustrious career, British director Ken Loach has directed more classics than some directors have ever had a chance to make in their entire careers. Among those classics is Land and Freedom (1995), which tells the...
When asked to describe The Nice Guys (2016), Ryan Gosling said that it is a "Shane Black film." Gosling stars as Holland March, a struggling, dim-witted private detective with a penchant for screwing up cases and Russell Crowe, a tough enforcer....
Just as Bonnie and Clyde are synonymous with any young male - female criminal duo, so have Thelma and Louise become the poster girls for female best friend ride-or-dies. The movie Thelma and Louise was released in 1991 and quickly became a...
"Jenny" is a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is, for the most part, a dramatic monologue about a prostitute. For most of the poem, the speaker, a wealthy, unmarried man, spends the night watching Jenny sleep. The subject matter in "Jenny" is...
Red Dust Road is an autobiographical novel by Scottish author Jackie Kay which tells the story of her twenty-year search for her birth parents, and her quest to be acknowledged by them both as their biological child. The book opens in the Nicon...
Based on David Mitchell's award-winning novel with the same name, Cloud Atlas is a sci-fi film distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures and is directed by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. The film was released at the Toronto International Film...
Parasite is a 2019 South Korean film directed by Bong Joon-ho. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, unanimously. The screenplay was written by Bong Joon-ho in collaboration with Han Jin-won, and the film stars...
Set in 1975, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again is a novel written in verse that follows ten-year-old protagonist Kim Hà and her family as they flee Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and adapt to life as refugees in Alabama.
Published in...
Her Body and Other Parties is the debut collection of some of the American author Carmen Maria Machado's best short stories. Published in 2017, it dives into the daily realities and experiences of the lives of modern women without any boundaries...
William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” consist of five verses composed between 1798 and 1801. They include “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” “I travelled among unknown men,” “Three years she grew in sun and...
"Miss Cynthie" is a short story originally published in Story Magazine in 1933. It's publication was controversial to some, because it was written by an African American author, Rudolph Fisher. At this time, it was often seen as unacceptable for...
"John Archer's Nose" is a short story by the African American author Rudolph Fisher. The story was originally published in 1935 in the Metropolitan Magazine. The story is the sole companion work of his most famous novel, The Conjure-Man Dies. In...
Rudolph Fisher only wrote his short story City of Refuge because he wanted to read something that was an accurate representation of day-to-day life in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. :The story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in...
The Walls of Jericho is the debut novel of author and physician Rudolph Fisher. The book, originally published in 1928, inspired Langston Hughes to title Fisher one of the wittiest authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Fisher is well known for his...
The Conjure Man Dies is a novel written in 1932 by African American author Rudolph Fisher. It tells the curious story of a mystic who is murdered, only to apparently come back to life. 'N. Frimbo is discovered dead at his conjure table and his...
John Milton’s “On The Morning of Christ's Nativity,” also known as the "Nativity Ode," is a poem about the birth of Christ, and also a poem about the birth of a poet. When Milton wrote the poem in 1629, he was 21 and had not yet published a...
Of Jonson's works, the satires are some of his most well-known. Every Man in His Humour was written in 1598 and was the first of his many "humour plays." Following Every Man in His Humour was a sequel, Every Man Out of His Humour. Though the first...
Debbie: An Epic is a book of poetry written by poet Lisa Robertson. This book was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998. In writing this text, Robertson was influenced by other epic texts, such as Virgil's Aeneid.
Praised...
Thomas Cromwell was an English lawyer who was Henry VIII's chief minister for eight years, orchestrating such things as the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the creation of the Church of England which was founded almost...
The Glass Hotel is the fifth novel penned by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel. One literary critic described the work as "a jigsaw puzzle that was missing its box"; the novel tells the story of two siblings whose lives are a mixture of...
William Wordsworth, along with Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge, is one of the "Lakeland Poets," a group that is widely credited with beginning the English Romantic Movement. The movement was characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment,...
Shelley’s poetry covers a variety of themes, but a reader of his poetry will almost always perceive some hint of radicalism, a challenge to one institutional tyranny or another: monarchy, government, church, or court. Thus, when analyzing Shelley’...
"The Nose" is a satirical, absurdist short story written by Nikolai Gogol between 1832 and 1833.
In "The Nose," Gogol seeks to show the image of an empty and bombastic man, Kovalev, who loves appearances, high social status, and favor from his...
One of Us is Lying is a fictional mystery book published in 2017. The book follows four narrators—Bronwyn Rojas, Nate Macauley, Addy Prentiss, and Cooper Clay—in the two months after their classmates Simon Kelleher’s death by peanut allergy.
After...
