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.
The Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor is, from its name, a collection of short stories written by the Irish author Frank O'Connor. It was first published on 1981. Today, O'Connor is best known for his memoirs and short stories.
This book is a...
"The Use of Force" is a story first published in 1938 as part of a compilation of work by William Carlos Williams. It tells the story of a doctor who is summoned to make a house-call to a family whom he has never met before, and who finds the...
Studying Callihroe is less of a literary enterprise and more of an archaeological one; scholars need to rely on complex techniques in order to find out more about the time in which this novel was written, and also to learn more about the...
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was an Italian poet, author, and journalist of the 19th century. He was born in San Salvatore Monferrato and started his career in the military, a tall, blue-eyed, handsome man. But he later ceased to continue his service...
Paul Celan is a survivor of the Holocaust and his experiences at the hands of the Nazis inform all of his poetry. His poems belong in a group of poems that are great, informative, and absolutely terrifying all at the same time, and he is mentioned...
Alice Oswald is an English poet born in 1966. Throughout high school, she never considered anything but writing as a future career. Thus, she continued her studies at New College, Oxford where she majored in classics. She has since won numerous...
Poor Sir Walter Raleigh. A gifted poet, masterful networker, adventurer, sailor and empire builder, he is most famous for gallantly spreading his cloak over a puddle on the ground for Queen Elizabeth to walk across, thereby saving her from wet...
"Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasion" is a short autobiographical memoir by Edith Maude Eaton, who published work under the name Sui Sin Far. To call herself "Eurasian" is really to simplify Far's racial heritage; she was a...
Toronto, Mississippi is a play written by the Canadian author and playwright Joan MacLeod. Written in 1987, the play follows the story of a young woman, Jhana, who tries to form stronger relations with her family but feels that she cannot do this...
Winnie-the-Pooh is one of the most famous works of the English author, A. A. Milne. A classic in children’s literature, Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926 and had such an extensive success that it overshadowed all of Milne’s previous novels,...
Sputnik Sweetheart is a 1999 book written by globally acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Originally published in Japanese, it was translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2001.
The plot of Sputnik Sweetheart revolves around Sumire, a...
War Trash is a novel written by Chinese author Xufei Jin, who writes under the pen name Ha Jin. Ha has lived in America for decades, and writes in English, so his novels are not "lost in translation", even though some of the Chinese history and...
Born in British Columbia, Canada in 1948, Jeannette Armstrong is a prolific poet, academic and campaigner for the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her works of poetry include 'Breath tracks', and she contributed to the collection 'Voices: Being...
Alice Walker is an African-American writer and active political advocate, known for her good-great works in fiction, non-fiction and poetry itself. She was born in 1944 in a small rural town in central Georgia, where her parents used to farmed the...
Gwendolyn Bennett was an American artist of paintings and literature. Although she wrote several novels and worked for a publishing company for some time, Bennett also wrote poems in her spare time. Some of her most famous poems are those included...
Peter Kropotkin was one of the most famous revolutionaries in Russia and his "Memoirs", first written in Russian, dealt with the way in which his life had progressed and how his experiences had laid the groundwork for his anarchist philosophies.
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The Long Loneliness is the autobiography of noted social activist and radical figure in Catholicism in America, Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Published in 1952, the autobiography covers much of the first half of the 20th century and traces Day’s...
Søren Kierkegaard has first published Either/Or in 1843 under the pseudonym of Victor Eremita after claiming to having found the manuscript hiding in an ancient piece of furniture. It is supposed to be written by two different people, seemingly...
First performed in 1604, Michaelmas Term is a play by the English playwright Thomas Middleton. The play is set in St. Paul's Cathedral, and revolves around a personified "Michaelmas Term". Divided into five acts, the play received good reception...
Inspired by his love for Jack London's writing, Mahbod Seraji decided to start writing himself. In his first novel, Rooftops of Tehran, he aimed to bring a piece of Persian culture and life closer to his readers. As the born Iranian felt that his...
The Diviners is one of the most autobiographical works of the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence, as well as her last one. It was published in 1974, the same year it won the Governer General's Literary Awards. It has ever since then been considered...
Maura Dooley is a British poet born on May 18, 1957. Though her parents were originally from Ireland, she grew up in Bristol, England. She obtained a degree from the University of York and now resides in London, teaching creative writing at the...
Fastness: A Translation from the English of Edmund Spenser is a translation of the poetry of Edmund Spenser published in 2017 by Irish author and translator Trevor Joyce. One of the most famous poems in the book is "The Ruines of Rome," which...
Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven is a novel that was written by Karen Salyer McElmurray. McElmurray is an American writer of many genres, and this novel is actually her first. Most of her books are of the fiction or memoir type, and Strange...