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 Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir written by the American writer Joan Didion. Most known for her literary journalism, Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking as a personal account of her grief not long after the death of her...
Tuck Everlasting is a classic tale about a family that does not age and is immune to injury and illness, and one girl who chooses to fiercely protect their secret.
Natalie Babbitt's inspiration for writing this book came from an experience with...
It Happened One Night is a pre-Code romantic comedy beloved for its charm, its picaresque style, and the glowing performances of its two stars, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It is considered to be one of the first "screwball comedies," a...
In 1928, MacLeish produced what many consider to be the defining manifesto for modernist poetry, “Ars Poetica,” with the famous concluding line insisting that
“A poem should not mean / But be.”
One of the conventions of modernism was, perhaps...
The Prince and the Pauper is a book written by American classic writer Mark Twain published in 1881. First published in Canada, it is the first historical fiction book written by Mark Twain. The book is set in the early 1500s, where readers follow...
Although infinitely more famous and well-known for his stories about upper crust twit Bertie Wooster and his ever-efficient and loyal butler Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse was no one-trick-pony. During his lifetime, stories featuring the forgetful Lord...
Jamaican novelist Marlon James' novel A Brief History of Seven Killings is a sprawling novel covering the attempted assassination of famed musician Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and the aftermath of said attempt. It goes through the crack wars in...
Breaking Night is Liz Murray's 2010 memoir that chronicles her homelessness. After being born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx, New York, Liz struggled fitting in at school. She got made fun of for her dirty clothes and...
Cristina Henriquez's 2014 novel The Book of Unknown Americans tells the love story of two teenagers: a Mexican girl and Panamanian boy - Mayor and Maribel. Maribel and her family emigrated to America from Mexico in order to send her to a special...
Tipi Hedren's pistachio green suit made The Birds such an iconic movie that it comes as an enormous surprise to movie goers that the story was in fact created by English writer Daphne du Maurier, and not by the undisputed king of horror, Alfred...
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" was written in England, although its author, Stephen Crane, and its protagonist, Jack Potter, are American. The story tells of Potter's return to the town of Yellow Sky with his bride, who comes from the east. He...
“The Blue Hotel” is either a very long short story or a fairly short novella. Either way, it was roundly met with universal rejection by every periodical to which it was initially submitted by Stephen Crane. Popular publishers of the time from...
Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey is a beloved hybrid of bildungsroman, travel writing, political commentary, and diary. It achieved even more prominence when turned into a popular film in 2004, and has...
James M. Cain, the author of the book on which Mildred Pierce is based, is one of several great American crime writers of the 1940s, a group that included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich. The novel Mildred Pierce was a...
Published in 1986 as an autobiography by South African author Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy explores the problems of the apartheid system in South Africa at the time. The system is basically institutionalized segregation - that is, the government...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is part of the volume Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband, the poet Robert Browning. This...
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was a family affair; the 1967 movie not only starred Katharine Hepburn, but also featured her niece Katharine Houghton as well. The movie, directed by Stanley Kramer, was groundbreaking because it was the first film of...
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories relating to the infamous character Sherlock Holmes, a notable detective who investigates various mysteries and crime set in the 1900s. George Newness publishing company first published...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a juvenile mystery fiction novel written by John Bellairs. It was published in 1973 by Puffin Books in the format of printed books and holds 179 pages. The book is illustrated by Edward Goey and is the first...
Il Divo is an Italian movie, and its title derives from the Latin "divus", meaning "God". It is a biographical drama about the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, 42st Prime Minister, and leader of the Christian Democracy Party. He was...
Louise Labe was a sixteenth-century poet that introduced the world to many feminist ideas. A French writer, many of her ideas and perceptions about women expressed through her poetry were unique to the time. At the time she was writing, women were...
Grasshopper Jungle is an apocalyptical, young adult, science-fiction, coming of age novel written by Andrew A. Smith. The book was published February 11, 2014 by Penguin Books. It has 400 pages and is sold in both hardback and paperback format....
The Book of Dede Korkut is the most famous of the epic stories of the Oghuz Turks, a Western Turkic people who spoke the Oghuz Turkic languages (not to be confused with the Turkish language) a group of twenty five different languages including...
The history of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation is nearly as interesting as the history that Bradford recounts in his seminal work of history. The original manuscript had vanished from its place in Boston sometime following the...
