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 Secret Garden is a children's novel by British writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. The story centers around a little girl named Mary Lennox who was born in India to wealthy parents. Mary's life in India suddenly comes to...
The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit poem describing the mythical Kurukshetra War between two sets of brothers descended from the king Bharata: the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is considered so historically important to the Hindu tradition that...
The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a comedy of manners in five acts that premiered at Covent Garden Theatre in 1775. It is considered one of Sheridan's best-known works and in addition to receiving many revivals, it has served as an...
Andy Weir self-published The Martian as an e-book in 2011. An example of "hard sf," in which factual speculation is minimized, The Martian includes scientific descriptions of space-flight, rocketry, thermodynamics, biology, and other phenomena.
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The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. At this time, Doris Lessing was moderately well known as a writer of novels and short stories; Notebook solidified her reputation. It was well regarded but somewhat controversial for its fragmented and...
"Bogland" appears in Seamus Heaney's second collection of poetry, Door Into The Dark (1969), which details Heaney's rural upbringing. "Bogland" is the final poem in the book, which is written with a great deal of attention devoted to evoking...
"Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music" is an ode written by John Dryden. It was written in 1697 in celebration of Saint Cecelia's day. The original ode was set to music by the musician Jeremiah Clarke, but, due to its relative obscurity at the...
Highly controversial in its time, Blasted is British author Sarah Kane's first play. It premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre. It has many shocking and rather gruesome elements, including rape, cannibalism, and suicide, elements which...
The Little Foxes is a play written in 1939 by acclaimed and controversial American dramatist Lillian Hellman. It takes place in a small town in Alabama in 1900 and looks at strained dynamics within a Southern family. The original production...
Kitchen is the novel that truly made Banana Yoshimoto, considered one of Japan’s most esteemed contemporary writers, famous and earned her the acclamation of critics and the public alike. Published in 1987, it rapidly became a bestseller; to date,...
Based on the true story of a female prisoner at the Qanatir Prison in Egypt, Woman at Point Zero is one of Nawal El Saadawi’s most celebrated works. After Egyptian publishers rejected the book because of its radical content, Saadawi had it...
As a key figure in the modernization of Bengali literature, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in every literary form that existed at the time: poetry, drama, prose, memoir, philosophy, musical lyrics. But he didn't write in every form all of the time, and...
The Government Inspector is one of the most famous Russian plays, renowned for its satirical portrayal of government officials and laced with apocalyptic, absurd overtones. Vladimir Nabokov praised the play, stating “The play begins with a...
Tracy Letts' black comedy August: Osage County was written in 2007 and premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago before transferring to Broadway and running for 648 performances. In 2008 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was widely...
The Hairy Ape tells the story of the fall of Yank, a proud and powerful stoker working aboard a steamship. Though respected by his fellow workers, a chance encounter with a millionaire's daughter who disdains him as an "ape" leads to a vain quest...
Usually, love is part of everyday life, a matter of routine devotion and simple joys. But occasionally, love can hit like a storm, ripping you away from the ordinary passage of time, and from yourself. Sappho's "Fragment 31" speaks of this...
If Beale Street Could Talk is James Baldwin's sixth novel, published on June 17, 1974. It was published the year that Baldwin turned 50. The novel received ambivalent reviews following its publication, but in recent years its reputation has grown....
Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God was published in 1964. This is Achebe’s third novel after his books No Longer At Ease and Things Fall Apart. Together these three books are often referred to as the African Trilogy. This book was published as...
John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" is a long-form poem published in 1687, in celebration of a religious holiday commemorating St. Cecilia, a Catholic martyr and patron saint of music and musicians. Dryden, in this poem, celebrates music...
An Unquiet Mind is a memoir written in 2009 by Dr. Kay Jamison, in which she recounts her lifelong struggle with manic-depressive illness. The tone of An Unquiet Mind varies between one of informal recollection of life events and one of a clinical...
Everything I Never Told You is the debut novel from Chinese-American author, Celeste Ng. The story begins with the drowning of Lydia Lee, a Chinese-American girl growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1970s. As the local police investigate the...
Hag-Seed is a 2016 novel by the prolific novelist Margaret Atwood and is the seventh book in Hogarth's "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. Like the other novels of the series, it is a standalone retelling of one of Shakespeare's classics.
In Hag-Seed, ...
Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874. The fourth of Thomas Hardy’s novels, it marked a turning point in his career as his first major success; it was the second novel which he published under his own name (his first two...
Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 surrealist silent short film directed by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and co-written by Buñuel and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. Despite its brevity—at its original frame rate, it runs just over sixteen...
