Newest Study Guides

Though one of several Victorian poets whose legacies have endured, Robert Browning is arguably the hardest of his contemporaries to classify. His work equally reflects his remarkable intellectualism, his interest in grotesqueness, and his refusal...

"The Fun They Had" was written by Isaac Asimov and first published in a children's magazine in 1951. The text is Asimov's most anthologized story, and was reprinted several times in the following decades.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is a poem Sylvia Plath wrote in October 1961, shortly before her death, amid poverty and a deteriorating marriage. It was published in her second and posthumous book of poetry, Ariel, in 1965. The poem is in four...

"anyone lived in a pretty how town" is a poem written by E. E. Cummings, whose name is often styled as e. e. cummings. The poem was first published in 1940 and tells the story of a small town, where the residents live a reliable but monotonous...

"Shiloh" is a poem by Herman Melville that depicts the aftermath of a notably bloody Civil War battle. The poem was published in 1886 as part of Melville's poetry collection about the conflict, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Alongside the...

Published in 2018, The Poet X is a young adult realistic fiction novel by Dominican-American poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo. The novel—specifically the protagonist Xiomara, who goes by "X"—draws on Acevedo's own experience growing up in New...

The Story of Tom Brennan is a young-adult novel by Australian author J.C. Burke. In the wake of a horrible accident, 17-year-old Tom Brennan must deal with the imprisonment of his brother and his move to a new town. Although he struggles to keep...

Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino (2008) is a drama film about Walt Kowalski, a widowed Korean War veteran who becomes an unlikely hero to his Hmong-American neighbors.

Set in Highland Park, Michigan, the film depicts the...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was widely acclaimed when it was published in 2003. Shortlisted for and awarded several prestigious prizes, Purple Hibiscus was praised for capturing a character and a nation on the cusp of...

All the Bright Places is the first Young Adult novel by Jennifer Niven. Published on January 6, 2015 by Knopf Publishing Group, All the Bright Places received positive reviews from The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and The Guardian, and...

"The Arrival of the Bee Box" is a poem by Sylvia Plath describing a speaker who orders a box full of bees and tries to figure out how to treat them. The poem was first published in Plath's posthumous 1965 poetry collection Ariel. It belongs to a...

Nick and the Candlestick is a poem by British-American writer Sylvia Plath, in which a mother compares herself to a miner in a cave before addressing her newborn child. "Nick and the Candlestick" was first published in Plath's posthumous poetry...

Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels is a 1961 English-language novel about several Filipino characters grappling with their identities after the Philippines gains independence from the U.S. following World War II.

When Connie, a wealthy...

“The Gift of the Magi” remains one of the most influential short stories of author O. Henry’s career—and the history of American literature altogether. First published in 1905 in the New York Sunday World, the quintessential Christmas tale...

"Personal Helicon," a five-stanza poem by Irish writer Seamus Heaney, describes a child's love of exploring wells from the perspective of his adult self. It links the process of exploring the physical world to both self-examination and poetic...

Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses is a young-adult novel set in a parallel world in which the native people of Africa (Cafrique in the novel) colonized the rest of the world. Crosses (dark-skinned descendants of people from Cafrique) are...

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, is one of the best-known poets of the twentieth century, and is regarded as one of the finest Spanish-language poets of his time: writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously...

“The Description of Cooke-ham” is the last poem in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), a book which made Lanyer the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of poetry. “Cooke-ham” is the first published country-house poem,...

Petals of Blood is a 1977 novel by Ngugi wa Thiong'o set in post-independence Kenya; its title derives from a line in Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Swamp.” The story centers on four characters whose lives are drastically changed as a result of the...

"The Dictators," a 1950 poem by the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, explores the power structures, inequalities, and violent conflicts in an unnamed dictatorship. It depicts ordinary individuals' suffering and death, juxtaposing these horrific scenes...

Written by Roald Dahl, Danny, the Champion of the World is a 1975 children's book about an impoverished English boy who helps his father poach pheasants from a villainous wealthy landowner.

After his mother dies when he is four months old, Danny...

A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle is a masque written by English poet John Milton and performed in 1634. Now known simply as Comus after the play's antagonist, the masque was originally performed on Michaelmas—a feast celebrating the archangel...

The Round House is author Louise Erdrich's fourteenth novel, and it was published in 2012. It is sometimes considered a thematic sequel to her 2008 novel, The Plague of the Doves, due to their shared focus on the concepts of justice and revenge....

"Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" is a 1957 poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, describing the encounter between a human speaker and a dead tuna at a vegetable market. The speaker addresses the tuna with a blend of awe and sadness, describing...