Newest Study Guides

Starting in the year 1900 near the Mediterranean Sea region, Isabelle Eberhardt writes her journal chronicling her epic adventures. A completely rebellious spirit, Eberhardt was an embodiment of women's rights - she did everything that a woman...

The poems of Peter Meinke were written from the 1980's to present day. Most of his poems are on the shorter side, but this does not mean that they do not have great meaning hidden in them. Meinke has published during his career a total of eighteen...

Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories is a novel consisting of seventy stories by seventy YA authors about bullying. It was made as a reaction to the suicide of the bullying victim Phoebe Prince in 2010. The two authors and editors Megan...

Wall Street is a 1987 film, directed and co-written by Oliver Stone. At the time of its release, New York finance was riding high and many were talking about the rise of the "yuppie" generation—young professionals who were profiting off the stock...

Eileen is writer Otessa Moshfegh's successful debut novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Eileen follows an unhappy and disturbed...

Speedboat is the first fictional novel written by Renata Adler, published in 1976, and re-published by New York Review Classics in 2013, as it was highly acclaimed. The book won the 1976 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was nominated for the...

Changes: A Love Story was published in 1991, and is a novel written by Alma Ata Aidoo. It tells of a certain time in the life of a career woman in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Esi is a very modern African woman who works for the government,...

Born in Flames is Lizzie Borden's monumental documentary-style feminist fiction film. In it, she ruminates on issues of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism in an alternative United States socialist 'democracy.' Directed, Written, Produced,...

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, located in Western Asia, and considered to be the very first Persian Empire. The Empire was founded in 550 B.C. and lasted for over two hundred years, and was larger than any previous...

The Business of Fancydancing (1992) is Sherman Alexie's first published novel. It is a collection of many poems and five short stories. Like most of Alexie's works, these poems and short stories are about Native Americans. Most deal with themes of...

The Book of Three is a high fantasy novel for children, written by Lloyd Chudley Alexander, published in 1964. The book was written and published after World War II and is inspired by Welsh mythology. It is the first in the first chronicle Lloyd...

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is Ben Fountain's groundbreaking debut war satire novel. Published in May 2012 by Ecco Press, the novel follows a group of war veterans as they go on a victory tour following an intensely violent firefight which by...

Before I Fall is Lauren Oliver's 2010 debut smash-hit young adult novel. This book follows a very popular high-school girl named Samantha ("Sam") as she is forced to relieve the day of her death - resulting from a tragic car accident - every day...

The Beautiful and Damned is the second novel of Fitzgerald first published in 1921 in the magazine “Metropolitan”. The novel is the second after This Side Of Paradise and the one that precedes The Great Gatsby, so the novel is considered as a...

Art is a French comedy play by Yasmina Reza. The play has run in London’s West End Wyndham’s Theatre, Broadway at the Royale Theatre, and at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the play had its premiere on October 28th, 1994. The...

Chris Kyle’s 2012 debut narrative American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History tells Kyle’s story as a Navy SEAL from 1999 – 2009, during which time he completed four tours in Iraq, as well as his childhood...

**Study Guide: *An American Childhood* by Annie Dillard** --- ###

Overview:

*An American Childhood* is a memoir by Annie Dillard, published in 1987. It is a reflective and poetic narrative that explores Dillard's experiences growing up in...

A charming but also deeply philosophical novella for children, The Little Prince was first published in the United States in April 1943, and published in France only in 1946, two years after its author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died. Today a...

Published in 1979, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler appeared near the end of Italo Calvino’s career. This literary work is considered one of his greatest, especially for the nontraditional style and structure that almost spits in the face of...

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis was published in 1999. Like his main character Bud, Curtis grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Curtis drew many of the book's events from the actual circumstances of the Great Depression and stories of the 1930s...

When Breath Becomes Air is neurosurgeon and author Paul Kalanithi's 2016 memoir chronicling his life and his life-ending illness -- stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He begins to notice symptoms as he is on the verge of completing nearly ten years...

Published in 1884, Ramona is an American novel written by Helen Hunt Jackson. The novel is set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War and is the story of a mixed-race Scottish-Native American orphan girl growing up in Southern...

Tucker: The Man and His Dream is one of the more lauded films of Francis Ford Coppola's from the 1980s. The backstory for the project dates all the way to Coppola's childhood, when his father invested in the Tucker car company, an innovative...

I Am Legend is a science-fiction horror novel written by Richard Matheson, published in 1954. It dives deep into a plot with disease-infested zombie-vampires taking over the world through an apocalypse. It follows the story of Robert Neville, an...