Newest Study Guides

Martin J. Sherwin spent much of his long and illustrious career researching the book that became American Prometheus, originally published in 2005. For twenty years, Sherwin studied and outlined American Prometheus, a biography about divisive...

Sofie Cramer's Text for You (2022) is a novel about Clara, a young woman eagerly awaiting her marriage to her fiance. However, after a night of intense arguing, Clara's fiance gets into a nasty accident and dies. Clara feels guilty and blames...

Reef is Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel, published in 1994. It was nominated for the 1994 Man Booker Prize, and won the 1997 Premio Mondello Five Continents Asia Prize, the 1994 Yorkshire Post First Work Prize, the 1994 New Voice Award, and was...

Laline Paull's Pod (2023) is set in the depths of the ocean, which has traditionally been far from the reach of humans. However, humans have begun to encroach on this previously unexplored place, destroying it. Pod is told from the perspective of...

Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait (2022) is a novel about Lucrezia di Cosimo de'Medici, a young woman who lives in Florence, Italy, in 1550. One day, at 15, Lucrezia's parents inform her that she will marry Alfonso II d'Este, a much older...

Black Butterflies (2022) is set in the spring of 1992 in Sarajevo during the so-called "siege of Sarajevo." Each night during the siege, racist gangs create barriers around the city, separating its ethnic areas into their sections. Each morning,...

Trespasses, published in late 2022, is Louise Kennedy's debut novel. Trespasses are set during the Irish Civil War, called "the Troubles." Specifically, Kennedy's novel follows Cushla, who lives with her mom in a small town in Belfast, Ireland....

Jacqueline Crooks' Fire Rush (2023) is a novel about Jamaican immigration to the United Kingdom during the 1980s. Fire Rush focuses on Yamaye, a rowdy young woman who frequently parties with her friends at a club called "The Crypt."

Yamaye has...

Katherine Center's Happiness for Beginners (2015) is a novel about Helen Carpenter, a divorced schoolteacher who hopes that a three-week wilderness survival course will leave her feeling confident and renewed. The unexpected presence of her...

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. It was first printed in the First Folio in 1623, and the earliest known performance is recorded to have been at Gray's Inn, one of London's law schools, on December 28th, 1594. However,...

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a short story collection by Ethiopian writer Meron Hadero, first published in 2022. The stories in the collection detail various lives of African immigrants in America.

The stories tackle different...

Alan Garner's Treacle Walker, published in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is a brief but poetic novel that explores themes of time, reality, and perception. The novel builds on much of Garner's previous work, which similarly...

Athol Fugard has spent much of his career chronicling the injustices of Apartheid South Africa. The Train Driver is Fugard's play, published in 2012, and tells the fact-based story of a young mother who committed suicide with her three children...

The Holocaust is a complex topic for adults to contend with. It is an even more difficult subject for children, which is why Morris Gleitzman's book Once, published in 2005, is so important.

Once attempts to distill the Holocaust into something...

Kindertransport is Diane Samuels' play, first published and performed in 1993. Samuels' play follows the evacuation effort in pre-World War II Germany from 1938 to 1939 and saw Jewish children's movement from Nazi-controlled areas to safe zones in...

Gish Jen's "In the American Society" is a poignant short story that first appeared in a literary magazine in 1986 and later became part of her critically acclaimed short story collection, Who's Irish?, published in 1999. The title itself captures...

Richard II was first printed in 1597 in a good quality text most likely taken from Shakespeare's manuscript. Two reprints in 1598 mention Shakespeare as the author. Later prints in 1608 and 1615 appear to be taken from the earlier versions, but...

As part of his 1605 commission to produce an entertainment for the Twelfth Night celebration, Ben Jonson, working in close collaboration with noted architect Inigo Jones as the scenic designer, produced the Masque of Blackness. King James I...

Much Ado About Nothing was first published in 1600 and was likely written in 1598. The 1600 printing was the only copy published during Shakespeare's lifetime, and bears the title inscription describing that the play "hath been sundrie times...

Bartholomew Fair was first performed on October 31, 1614 by the company Lady Elizabeth's Men. It is a Jacobean comedy and is generally considered one of Jonson's four famous comedies – among The Alchemist, Epicoene, and Volpone. Of these plays, ...

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a novel by Angie Cruz, first published in 2022. Set in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights, it tells the story of a middle-aged Dominican woman named Cara Romero.

The novel follows Cara...

The first performance of Measure for Measure is believed to have taken place in 1604, during the reign of King James I. By this time, Shakespeare is believed to have begun writing his plays for performance at the Blackfriars theatre, a small,...

V.S. Naipaul is one of the best-known Carribean writers ever. His work, which focuses on the human condition, has been widely-read and is still in print today. One of Naipual's most acclaimed novels is A Bend in the River, published in 1979 and...

"homage to my hips" is a work by the twentieth-century American poet Lucille Clifton. Originally published in her 1980 collection Two-Headed Woman, the poem uses the symbol of its speaker's hips to explore the experience of Black womanhood. The...