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.
Mark Twain is one of the most famous figures in American literature, and is known for his novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What is not as widely known about him is the surprising amount of essays...
Released in 1988, Mississippi Burning is a crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker. Though released in the late 1980's, it features some of America's touchiest Civil Right's Era topics - a disappearance of three civil rights activists is met...
“Sunny Prestatyn” is one of the poems in Philip Larkin’s poetry volume called The Whitsun Weddings, which is a collection of 32 poems published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber. The poem was believed to be first published in 1964, though...
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book written by Frederick Brooks about Software project management. It was published by Addison-Wesley in 1975 and was re-published in 1982 and 1995. It is the first book in a planned...
The Valley of Amazement is a novel of two halves: the first, written from the point of view of Violet, the abandoned daughter of a courtesan house owner mother who abruptly leaves Shanghai to fly to San Francisco where she is able at last to meet...
Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) takes place in 1931 and follows three girls who live in Australia near the so-called rabbit-proof fence. The town is called Jigalong and the girls are half-Aboriginal; they initially follow a traditional...
Ross Gay is a prolific young writer that gained prominence in the poetic circles of America. He published several books and recently started teaching at the University of Indiana. He is further known for his outspoken opinions on social...
Malone Dies was first published in French in 1951 under the title Malone Meurt. Samuel Beckett the author of the novel native to Ireland, later translated the book into English so that it could reach a wider audience. Malone Dies is the second of...
Bad Feminist is a collection of essays by Roxane Gay. It was published in 2014 by Harper Perennial in English. The book confronts feminist ideologies, what a good feminist is and what a person can and can’t do, even though they love doing it....
I Love Dick is a book written by the American author named Chris Kraus. The book was published in 1997 by Semiotext(e) and republished in 2006. The book is written from the writer’s perspective (Chris Kraus), as her marriage falls apart when she...
Blaine Harden is a reporter with a particular interest in North Korea and its politics. In 2008 he met a young man named Sin In Geun. The young man had defected from North Korea, no mean feat considering it is one of the most repressive and brutal...
Evicted tells the story of eight poorer families who are struggling to pay rent during the 2008 financial crisis (which over 3 million people lose their homes and many lose their retirement savings). It deals with how people survive in the face of...
In his short novella Signs Preceding the End of the World (originally published in Spanish but later published in English), which The Guardian said "From its opening pages... this marvelously rich, slim novel is working on many levels," author...
Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat is best known as a fiction novelist and short story writer, but her memoir, written in 2007, was inspired by the head-on collision of both tragedy and joy in her life, occurring on the same day. Danticat...
Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, subtitled 'Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism', was met with very polarizing reactions when it was published in 2018. In her book, DiAngelo, an academic, unveils the reasons why white...
Published in 2008, The Sky Inside is a science fiction novel by American author Clare B. Dunkle. The book is the first in the two part The Sky Inside series, and was received with moderate reviews upon release. The book follows the story of main...
First written in 1948, "Seventeen Syllables" was published in an anthology of Hisaye Yamamoto's most famous works in 1988. As a collection, it includes stories that span almost forty years of writing and as well as her seminal work, includes other...
Spirited Away is a Japanese fantasy animation film released in 2001. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazki, it was originally a sort of side project that Miyazki worked on whilst his personal projects were busy being rejected by all of the studios...
The Last King of Scotland, directed by Kevin Macdonald, written by Peter Morgan (The Crown, Frost/Nixon) and Jeremy Brock based on the novel by Giles Foden was produced by Lisa Bryer, Andrea Calderwoods and Charles steel. The 2006 film tells the...
Ghostwritten is a 1999 drama novel written by David Mitchell. It was published by Holder and Stoughton and won several prizes. The book is David’s debut novel, and many of his next books were written in the same fashion and universe as ...
Growing up in the 1800s in a wealthy, upper class English family, Helen Beatrix Potter led a cocooned and isolated childhood in a large, sprawling home; she was a lonely child who was also intrigued by the world around her, particularly in the...
"Inland Passage" and Other Stories is a 1985 collection of short fiction by Canadian author Jane Rule. Famous for her exploration of LGBT (and specifically Lesbian) themes in her writings, Rule continues to explore same-sex relationships between...
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel that explores the life of Elizabeth as she grows from a young girl to an adult. As a child, she is teased because she is fat, and is scarred forever because of it. Her childhood friend, named Mel, seems...
One never knows what one might find by having a good rummage at an estate sale; at one such sale, one attendee discovered an antique manuscript that revealed itself to be The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the first known memoir penned...