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.
Although a work of fiction, The Well of Loneliness was almost like a memoir for its author, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, who was herself a lesbian who spent a large part of her dating years chasing women who were married at the time. Like the book's...
The Unfortunate Traveller is a picaresque novel, which means that the hero of the story is a rogue living by his wits, usually from the lower classes of society. The best known example of this is Monsieur Thernadiere, the crafty hostelry owner in...
Senator Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance (released in April 2014) is a New York Times Bestseller, a rarity for a political book -- let alone for a political book of a then-inspiring Senator from Massachusetts. Primarily, the book is memoir. It...
Andrew Yang's 2018 book The War on Normal People is an interesting book. Released as a way for Yang to deliver his central campaign policies, Yang discusses things like technology change, automation, the economy (and jobs), and one of his core...
Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (released in 2007) is a memoir chronicling Joe Biden's life and career in the United States senate (where he represented Delaware from 1973 until he became Vice President in 2009). The book chronicles Biden's...
In many ways, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Promise is former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden's 2020 campaign book. Secondarily, though, the book chronicles the Biden families 2014, a year in which they lost their...
At its core, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream is a campaign book. A campaign book for former Mayor of San Antonio, Texas and former HUD secretary under President Obama Julian Castro as he prepared for his 2020 Presidential...
In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont ran what many considered to be a highly successful presidential campaign for the Democratic party. So successful, in fact, that some supporters believe that he should have beaten Hillary Clinton and won...
Although Cory Booker is perhaps most famous for calling himself "Spartacus" on the Senate floor (referencing Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name). However, Booker is also a candidate for the Democrat Party for the 2020 election (against...
The Senator Next Door is Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar's memoir. The blurb on the book describes its content very well: "One of the U.S. Senate's most candid--and funniest--women tells the story of her life and her unshakable faith in our...
Becoming is a twenty-four chapter memoir by former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. More celebrity than political figure, Mrs Obama is said to have employed the services of a ghostwriter to help her put her memories, experiences...
Naomi Klein, author of ‘On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a New Deal’, has been an activist against capitalism’s exploitative practices since 1999. Scathing critiques against the world’s largest and most powerful brands for their unethical...
Few ancient texts have endured the passage of time with the same influence and relevance as The Art of War by the Chinese military general and strategist Sun Tzu. While countless works from antiquity have been lost to history, The Art of War...
An American Marriage is an interesting novel. Part of it is told in the third person; other parts are told in the first person in an epistolary form (i.e. letters). It tells the story of a middle-class black couple named Roy and Celestial. The two...
To date, British Playwright Alan Ayckbourn has written over 79 published and/or performed full-length plays. Absurd Person Singular is his 12th play. It first premiered off-Broadway in 1972 and on-Broadway in October of 1974 and received very...
Leigh Hunt was a famous Romantic writer, editor, and critic who lived from 1784 to 1859. Being a prominent literary figure he was the contemporary of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Hunt's literary career began with the...
To the North was originally published in 1932, a time when few women writers were able to get the same fame and notoriety as their male counterparts. Elizabeth Bowen and To the North helped to change that. Bowen's fascinating life is reflected in...
Although it is a very short book, Man's Search for Meaning is perhaps one of the most significant and impactful works of nonfiction published in the relatively recent past. The first portion of the book chronicles Frankl's experiences in Auschwitz...
Interestingly, Nobody Knows My Name is not an exceptionally unique book in James Baldwin's vast and impressive bibliography. It would be fair to assume that an author most famous for his novels would have written more novels than essays. That is...
A black comedy come drama movie, A Serious Man takes a not-so-serious look at one Jewish man's crisis of faith after his professional and personal life implodes. It shows what can happen when a person's orderly, well-arranged life can start to...
The Consolidator or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon, is a 1705 satirical fantasy/science fiction novel by English author Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.
As described by Karen Severud Cook in her article "Daniel...
On November 28th, 2018, Margaret Atwood announced a sequel to her 1985 classic novel The Handmaid's Tale. Announcing the novel on her Twitter profile, she wrote: "Yes indeed to those who asked: I’m writing a sequel to The #HandmaidsTale....
Nikole Hannah-Jones became a staff writer for the New York Times in 2016; she devised the 1619 Project to take another look at the legacy of slavery in the United States, its release neatly coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of the...
In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.
For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a...
