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.
Saint Mazie is a novel written by Jami Attenberg and published in 2015. Set in America during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, Saint Mazie tells the story of a woman living in New York City named Mazie Phillips. She owns The Venice, a famous...
The Middlesteins is a novel about compulsive eating: psychotic-level, obsessive-compulsive eating. It is also a comedy, though—as one must surely suspect—the humor is of a hue well beyond the blackest of patent leather. A comedy about a man who...
The Festival of Insignificance is a seven-part novel by Czech-born French author Milan Kundera. The novel was first published in French in 2013 and translated into English in 2015 by Linda Asher. The Festival of Insignificance shares its...
The Hand that Feeds You is a 2015 psychological thriller/mystery novel by A.J. Rich, a pseudonym for award-winning authors Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment. It features a graduate student studying victim psychology who comes home to find her boyfriend...
The Well is a novel by Elizabeth Jolley, an Australian-English author. It was published on September 1, 1986 by Penguin Books. The narrative presents information about two girls (Hester and Katherine) who become closer to each other more and more...
The Hunger Games is the first novel in a trilogy that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Together, they are known as the Hunger Games Trilogy. This first novel has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than sixty weeks, and...
Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1907 is an account written by Robert Blobaum. It covers the revolution in Poland in 1905 which led to large and significant changes politically. Blobaum, the author of this work, is the Eberly Family Distinguished...
Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, at the suggestion of her husband - in order to take her mind off of her infant son William's death from scarlet fever in 1845. The plot is based on the real-life murder of a progressive mill...
A Theory of Justice is a work that was published in 1971 and was written by John Rawls. Rawls is a moral and political philosopher who has won many awards, held many prestigious positions, and made democracy be seen in a much better light....
Eleanor and Park was written by Rainbow Rowell in 2013 and was published by St. Martin’s Press. It is Rainbow Rowell’s second book and her first for young adults, and received significant critical acclaim upon its publication- it received a...
Annie Dillard started to write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the srping of 1973, a book detailing her explorations of Tinker Creek, a Virginia valley near Roanoke. The book documents her year in Tinker Creek, stalking wildlife and studying the flora...
Sandor Marai was a Hungarian novelist and journalist best known for his 1942 work Embers. He was born to a noble family in what is now Kosice, Slovakia in 1900. As a young child, Marai's family traveled extensively and he was exposed to various...
Sag Harbor is the fourth novel by highly-regarded writer Colson Whitehead and represents something of a departure from his previous works in both tone, style and subject matter. The story is a semi-autobiographical account of an African-America...
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is memoirs written by Barack Obama, published in July 1995. At that moment he was starting his political campaign for Illinois Senate.
Starting form the cover of the book attention should be...
"Eating Poetry” originally appeared in the second published collection of Mark Strand’s verse, Reasons for Moving (1968). This was Strand’s breakthrough volume which first gained him notoriety for his unique and idiosyncratic view expressed in his...
Published in 1987 as Murakami's fifth novel, Norwegian Wood is based on his short story "Firefly,” which was later included in his short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Contrary to his expectations and wishes, the book turned him...
“Tobermory” was first published in 1909 in The Westminster Gazette. The original version of the story did not include the character Clovis. The story was later revised for book publication and the revised version incorporated Clovis, a character...
“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was originally published in the Saturday Press in 1865 before appearing two years later in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. The story can present something of a prickly problem for old-fashioned...
Sandra Cisneros is a novelist and short story author of Mexican-American descent, who was published several acclaimed works including The House on Mango Street and Woman Holler Creek and Other Stories.. She was born into a large family in Chicago...
St. Benedict founded the Benedictine monastic order, which settled in a community on a hill about 75 miles southeast of Rome called Monte Cassino. It was there that he and his fellow monks destroyed a pagan temple honoring Apollo and built a...
Queen Elizabeth I gave this speech to her troops in August 1588, as they were gathered at Tilbury, Essex, one of the counties in the East Anglia region of England and one of the mainstays in the Tudor kingdom and very close to London. Her troops...
Gilead is Marilynne Robinson’s second and most famous work. Published in 2004, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Robinson based her novel on real places and real people. Gilead, while fictional,...
That was Then, This is Now was published in 1971. Its title is derived from one of the pivotal lines of the book. It is set in the same world as The Outsiders, which was published 4 years before it in 1967, and even features a brief overlap of...
Published in 1935, Untouchable is Mulk Raj Anand’s first major novel. The novel’s format is very simple—it follows the day in the life of an “untouchable,” a member of India’s lowest social caste. Despite its simplicity, Untouchable is a powerful...