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.
Gennifer Albin's first novel, Crewel, explores one girl's experience navigating the dysfunctional social and political systems of a completely controlled dystopian society. Published in 2012, Crewel is the first book in the Crewel trilogy. It...
Published in 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was met with immediate critical and popular success when it first appeared. An American realist novel set during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck's work documents hard times...
What is the What is a 2006 novel written by Dave Eggers. While Eggars takes full authorship of the book, the story is the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Deng is a Sudanese refugee and was a member of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
After...
No Longer at Ease is Chinua Achebe's second book and part of what is commonly referred to as the African Trilogy; this includes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi. Some critics discern...
Many critics during Mikhail Lermontov's time felt that he created Pechorin, the main character of A Hero of Our Time, in his own likeness. Besides similarities in age and occupation, characters in Pechorin's life resemble individuals in...
Touching Spirit Bear, published in 2001, is an account of a young boy's experience with violence, forgiveness, and nature as he is banished to a remote Alaskan island as punishment for a violent crime. During this time, he is confronted by a rare...
Friday Night Lights is a novel by famed sports writer and journalist H.G. “ Buzz” Bissinger. The novel was published in 1990 and surrounds the Permian Panther’s 1988 high school football season. His landmark novel has sold roughly 2 million copies...
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman is perhaps the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright's greatest and most enduring work. Published in 1975, the work is often studied and performed in colleges and universities, as well as staged worldwide.
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The Real Inspector Hound is a one-act play modeled after the parlor mystery genre that was extremely popular at the time. Written between 1961-62, it is considered one of Tom Stoppard’s early works. The play is actually a play-within-a-play: the...
George Etherege’s Man of Mode is one of the most renowned plays of Restoration England. Critic Gamini Salgado wrote, “Its chief merit consists in the uncompromising realism with which it investigates the implications of Restoration libertinism.”
...Marie Lu spent most of her youth writing, although Legend is her first published novel. In writing Legend, Lu was inspired by the stage version of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Hugo's work and its subsequent adaptations follow Jean Valjean,...
Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be one of his most important works. Ultimately, it is a work about overcoming the self. It combines inverted allusions to the Bible with Greek mythology and ancient Persian religion.
Nietzsche composed...
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Downis the poignant story of a young Hmong girl suffering from epilepsy who is caught in the cultural chasm between her family and her rationalist American doctors. The story shows the tragic consequences of a...
Pushkin, already an established poet, began writing Eugene Onegin in 1823 while exiled from the capital to southern Russia. He published parts of each chapter in serialization as he wrote them before printing each complete chapter in booklet form....
Burmese Daysis George Orwell's first novel, and a searing critique of British imperialism. It is notable for deriving its plot and themes from the events of Orwell's own life.
In 1922 Orwell traveled to Burma to become an English police officer....
"The Devil and Tom Walker" first appeared in author Washington Irving's 1824 collection of short stories,Tales of a Traveller, in the "Money-Diggers" section. Though it is still widely known, it is not quite as famous as some of his other works,...
The Garden Party and Other Storiesby Katherine Mansfield was first published in 1922 by Constable and Co., a notable publishing house in London. The work was dedicated to her husband, John Middleton Murry. The collection of short stories was the...
This collection of short stories includes some of Ray Bradbury's most famous and cherished works. Many are from his 1950 short story collection, The Martian Chronicles, which chronicles the colonization of Mars by men from Earth. Although The...
Chinese Cinderella is the story of Adeline Yen Mah's youth as the unwanted daughter of a rising businessman in the midst of a great transformation within Chinese society. Adeline’s affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother...
Silencewas published in 1966 and is often regarded as Endo's finest achievement. It won the Tanizaki prize in Japan the year it was published.Silencetells the story of a young Portuguese priest, sent to Japan in the 1600s when Christians in Japan...
Equus,written in 1973, is one of Peter Shaffer's most celebrated plays. It tells the story of a boy who has a strange, religious fascination with horses. He is treated by a psychiatrist who, in turn, realizes some things about himself during these...
In a letter to the Daily Chronicle dated 28 April 1898, Shaw explained the conversations that led him to writeMrs. Warren's Profession.His friend, actress Janet Achurch, had pointed him to the short storyYvetteby Guy de Maupassant as a possible...
Emerson lived and wrote in the days of Westward expansion, religious upheaval, and domestic and international political ferment.
He and his generation grew up during the War of 1812, the Annexation of Texas, the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the...
The Wars is a 1977 novel by Timothy Findley about the experiences of a young Canadian officer in World War I. Findley dedicated the novel to his uncle, Thomas Irving Findley, who fought in the First World War and survived. Findley drew upon...
