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.
Few books are as innovative or interesting as David Almond's Kit's Wilderness (published in 2000). A children's novel, the book is set in a made-up northeast English town and tells the story of young Kit Watson and his family who move back to the...
Usually, nothing good can come of a family heirloom grandfather clock striking thirteen; Tom Long, though, finds that there is a whole new world that opens up for him when he hears the thirteenth chime. Philippa Pearce's classic children's fantasy...
First published in 1859, George Eliot's short novella The Lifted Veil tells the story of a man who is overcome by haunting visions of the future. An unhappy man, he is overwhelmed by those visions and a tremendous amount of thoughts in his head,...
Born in 1927, Yusuf Idris was an Egyptian writer and playwright. Originally trained to be a doctor, Idris started writing a regular newspaper column while working at a hospital in Cairo. In 1954, his first anthology of short stories was published,...
Judith Clare Thompson, born in 1954, is a Canadian playwright. Initially training and working as an actress, Thompson published her first play in 1980 and afterwards focused solely on her writing career. She has been the recipient of numerous...
Written by acclaimed playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (released in 1928) was inspired by the real-life case of a woman named Ruth Snyder, who brutally murdered - along with her lover Henry Gray - her husband. Machinal, though,...
There is almost a disconnect between Roxane Gay and her body, hence the use of parentheses in the title. The memoir is the story of her body but it seems to have taken on an identity all of its own, because as far as Gay is concerned, there is...
Dirty Dancing is a romantic dance film produced by Linda Gottlieb and directed by Emile Ardolino. The film was made in 1987 and was distributed by Vestron Pictures. Leading cast members, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze star as main protagonists...
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is Ottessa Moshfegh’s much-anticipated 2018 follow-up to her debut novel, Eileen. Eileen received rave reviews, won the author a coveted Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
My...
Had the oppressive Soviet regime not cracked down on author Victor Shklovsky and his Russian formalists. the world may have seen more books by the ingenious author. Still, the world was able to read Theory of Prose (originally published in 1929),...
Hamlet is often regarded as the Renaissance narrative which has most aggressively been put to film. Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 entry marks yet another entry into that series of films.
Based on William Shakespeare's play of the same name,...
Ireland has produced some of the best playwrights in the world - Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Martin McDonagh.
Throughout his long and illustrious career, McDonagh has produced a number of tremendous plays -- and some...
Although not exceptionally well-known, Masahiro Shinoda's film Double Suicide (1969) is one of the most unique films ever to have been produced. Based on a Japanese play called The Love Suicides at Amijima, Double Suicides tells the story of the...
Bodega Dreams tells the story of a young man named Chino who lives in Spanish Harlem. One day he crosses paths with Willie Bodega, who is part man, part legend. He is also a gangster, a community activist and a man with dreams that know no limits....
Written by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right examines the viewpoint of Tea Party Movement (a movement within the Republican Party which advocates for lower overall...
The Shoe Horn Sonata is a play by Australian playwright John Misto, one of Australia's most eminent playwrights who has also worked as a script writer for Australian television, creating and writing the hit television series The Damnation of...
Written by Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, Sharp Objects (Flynn's debut novel which was published in 2006) tells the story of a woman named Camille Preaker. After a while away and after a short spell at a psychiatric hospital, Preaker returns to...
Same Kind of Different as Me : A Modern Day Slave, and International Art Dealer and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together may well be a contender for the longest, and most unwieldy, book title of 2006; co-written by Ron Hall and Denver Moore,...
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was written in 1977 by Canadian author Ellen Coer. At the time of the book’s publication, Coerr was already an established children’s author, having written “Twenty Five Dragons” and “The Legend of the Golden...
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set off for the west coast of Australia from her starting point at Alice Springs. Her companions were her dog, and family of four camels that consisted of a larger male named Dookie, a smaller male named Dub, a wild female...
Naguib Mahfouz has written over one hundred short stories during his career, sixteen of which are published together in one volume, with his most famous allegorical work, Half a Day, also takes on the mantle of title.
Half a Day is an...
Marieke Nijkamp's book This Is Where It Ends (published in 2016) is certainly an interesting and unique book. The book takes place over the course of only 54 minutes and goes minute-by-minute through one students quest for revenge as they begin to...
Boys & Sex written by Peggy Orenstein is about exactly what the title hints: Boys and Sex. After writing her book; Girls & Sex she found the trail of writing from the other point of view. The book opens up a dialogue about boys, their...
Written by Nobel Prize in Economics Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) which summarizes Kahneman's work over several decades first in cognitive bias, prospect theory, and finally, his work on happiness and what it means to be happy....