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.
Written by acclaimed children's author Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon (released in 2016) tells the story of a young girl named Luna. Luna, though, is special. Because she was raised by a witch and was often around magic, Luna one days...
Originally published in 1925, "The Gardener" is a story written by British-Indian author Rudyard Kipling and published in France. The story follows the life of main character Helen Turrell, who becomes pregnant out of wedlock in India, which, at...
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem is a book by Moustafa Bayoumi published in 2008. The book chronicles the story of seven Americans that had immigrated to the country from Arab nations. Living in New York City, they were deeply impacted by the...
A Hope in the Unseen is a novel written by Ron Suskind, describing the experiences of a student called Cedric Jennings as he navigates high school and college as an African American student. This novel is mostly set during the 1990s and reveals...
Originally published in 2005, A History of the World in Six Glasses is a non-fiction book by English author Thomas Standage. The book chronicles the history of humankind through six distinct beverages, beginning with beer. Beer was invented...
Ralph Waldo Emerson published a collection titled simply Essays: First Series in 1841. The book was comprised of a dozen essays and set the template for Emerson’s preference in book-length publications to come with its structure composed of...
Heroes is a novel written by Robert Cormier and was published in 1998. The novel is concerned with the impact of World War II, including the emotional, physical and psychological effects. It is also influenced by other historical events, including...
The Happiest Refugee was originally published in 2010 as a memoir by Anh Do. The memoir tells of the journey Do and his family took to escape the war-torn communist country of Vietnam. The family had to sail across the Pacific Ocean, and...
Annie Proulx wrote The Half-Skinned Deer for an anthology of short stories called Off the Beaten Path. It was inspired by a visit she had made to a preserve run by the Nature Conservancy after they had invited her to look around the park and to...
Written by husband-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky (published in September 2009) is a non-fiction book about advocacy and education. In it, Kristof and WuDunn aim to enlighten readers about the serious problems women...
"When God closes a door, he opens a window. But it's up to you to find it." So went the favorite saying of Lily Casey Smith, the indomitable frontier woman who is the protagonist of Half Broke Horses, a book penned by her granddaughter, Jeannette...
English author Susan Hill is best known for the gothic novel The Woman in Black. I'm the King of the Castle was published in 1970, and tells the story of two young boys Edmund and Charles, whose relationship is toxic at best and borders on the...
It is a horror novel, written by Stephen King, and published in 1986 by Viking Press (now Penguin Random House.) The book tells the story of a mythical creature that takes on the form of one’s worst fears, most typically a clown figure known only...
It is not known whether or not Edgar Allan Poe created the concept of an imp of the perverse or whether he simply popularized the phrase when he used it as the title and the theme of this story. Simply put, an imp of the perverse is a little...
Kim Addonizio (born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., USA) is an American poet and novelist. She has published several volumes of poetry, starting in 1994 with The Philosopher’s Club and was the recipient of numerous awards, such as the Guggenheim...
Katharine Burdekin's dystopian novel was written in the early 1930s, but all but disappeared without a trace later on in the decade because its subject matter was considered detrimental to the morale of a nation under threat of German invasion....
Released in 1974, Alice in the Cities is a German movie, and it is also the first part of director Wim Wenders' road movie trilogy, followed by The Wrong Move in 1975, and another year later, trilogy-closing Kings of the Road. The film centers...
When a book is selected as a Book Club Choice by Oprah Winfrey, it is almost guaranteed to reach the top of any bestseller list that is worth being at the top of. Such is the case for Icy Sparks, a novel that tells the story of a protagonist who...
Virginia Woolf is a world-famous creative writer, critic, and theorist of modernism. The Voyage Out is Woolf's first novel, the characters of which go overseas to relax on the coast of South America. As Woolf's descriptions reveal, the characters...
The Years is a short novel penned by Virginia Woolf that actually started out life as lecture given by Woolf to the National Society for Women's Service, in January 1931. Woolf was conscious that much of her work represented women from a...
More than any other U.S. President before him, Donald Trump has inspired countless books. Among those books is A Very Stable Genius, which chronicles -- through the eyes of the authors and their sources -- the first three years of Trump's...
We have all heard the expression, "Doctor! Heal thyself!" and usually said it with a smile; but in all seriousness, what is a therapist to do when she finds herself in need of the same kind of tender ear and therapeutic advice that she usually...
Written by author Richard Wagamese, Ragged Company (published in 2008) tell a story of four people named Amelia, Timber, Double Dick, and Digger. The four are almost always homeless. One day, however, they decide to go into a warm movie theater to...
Like many of his novels, H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man centered around a mad scientist protagonist; the eccentric character, a man named Griffin, invents an invisibility formula that is centered around the refractive index of a body's...