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.
Although written as a novel, The Moon Is Down was originally intended to be a play, and was written in such a way that it was easily adapted for the stage. Written in 1942, the novel is set in an unspecified small country in Northern Europe that...
Veronica Roth's novel Divergent was adapted for the big screen in 2014. It is a dystopian science fiction film on one hand but is also an action thriller, too. It is the first in the Divergent Series and is sent in a post-apocalyptic Chicago,...
Based on Dracula by Bram Stoker and the film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) follows Count Dracula as he moves from Transylvania to Wismar. On his journey, Dracula spreads the Black Plague across...
In all of the books you have read about the devil, you have probably never imagined him to be gainfully employed as a professor, engaged in debate with a monk called Michael or spending his down time philosophizing about rationalism, religion and...
Family is the story of slavery as told through the eyes and experiences of one family i particular. Clora is a slave; the story tells how her blood runs from its African roots all the way around the world and mixing with other races, classes and...
The Book of Mrs Noah is a novel by French-English author Michele Roberts. It is the story of a woman who visits Venice and begins to imagine that she is Noah's wife. The trip becomes less of a vacation and more of a journey of self-exploration and...
Steve Kowit was born June 30, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. Kowit is best known for his lively poetry. On his website, he jokes about the boredom of poetry readings and claims that his are "lively, entertaining, and passionate".
Over the course of...
The phrase "los vendidos" has two meanings when translated into English; "the sold ones", and "the sellouts". Neither translation speaks highly of the central characters in this one-act play by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez; the play takes a...
Much like many of von Trier's films, Melancholia (2011) is an exceedingly bizarre and unique film. The film follows two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively) who have a strained relationship. However, once...
Reading Teju Cole's debut novel Open City is really not like reading a novel at all; it is more like reading a journal or a travelogue written for the writer to look back on themselves and use as an aide memoir when wanting to go back over a trip...
Shreds of Tenderness is a 2001 play by Ugandan playwright John Ruganda. It explores themes of greed, individualism, and betrayal on a familial and national level and features conflict over everything from crops to political power.
The play takes...
Gurinder Chadha's Bridge and Prejudice (released in the United Kingdom in 2004 and the United States in 2005) is a Bollywood-style remake of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice. The film follows four unmarried daughters in an Indian family....
Widely renowned as one of the greatest writers of our modern era, Haruki Murakami wrote After the Quake after the catastrophic Kobe earthquake in 1995. The collection of short stories was first published in Japan in 2000, with an English...
Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a freelance reporter who is recording the violent events taking place in the middle of the night in downtown Los Angeles, and sending them to the local television news station. He is an ambulance chaser,...
In 1995, Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton first worked together in the blockbuster smash Apollo 13, but despite the movie's success, and the two actors' obvious on-screen compatibility, they did not work together again for another twenty two years, when...
T2 Trainspotting (2017) is the sequel to 1996's smash-hit Trainspotting (which made $72 million against a budget of only $1.7 million). It stars many of the actors from the first film (like Ewan McGregor, who reprised his role as Mark Renton) and...
In 1960, French author Albert Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident. Prior to his death, Camus published a number of great works like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He was also working a brand new novel entitled The First Man,...
Nathaniel Hawthorn owes the writing of his last novel, The Marble Faun, to the fact that Franklin Pierce was such an incompetent President that even today, more than 150 years and 30 contenders later, he still consistently ranks among the five...
Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was a satirical political film produced, directed, written , starring, and scored by the famed British actor and comedian, Charlie Chaplin. The film makes fun of the Nazi Regime in Germany, which was at its...
Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son,...
J.D. Salinger is best known for the coming-of-angst novel The Catcher In The Rye, but he is also revered and respected as one of America's pre-eminent writers of short stories as well. His career as a short story writer began when he was still in...
Sometimes it is necessary to have another income source when one is first thinking about becoming a poet. Such was life for American poet and essayist Dana Gioia, who spent the first fifteen years of his writing career penning feverishly at night...
Included in Tobias Wolff's book Back in the World are ten stories (ranging from "The Missing Person" to "The Rich Brother") which cover rather normal people in abnormal situations. In one story, a kind and gentle priest finds himself in a Las...
Not to be confused with the Laurel and Hardy movie of the same name that was released six years previously, Leo McCarey's Duck Soup was the last of five Marx Brothers movies to be released by Paramount Studios. It also marked the ending of the...