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.
Described by fans as a cross between Game of Thrones and X-Men, The Young Elites is the first book of author Marie Lu’s latest trilogy. It is an epic fantasy set in an alternate world that has a medieval European feel. Amongst its contemporaries...
Ally Condie primarily drew inspiration for Matched from a conversation she and her husband had over dinner one night in late 2008. He posed the question: what if someone wrote the perfect algorithm for matching people with one another, and the...
The History Boys is one of Alan Bennett’s most celebrated plays. The narrative is heavily inspired by Bennett's own experiences in school and the process through which he gained entrance to Oxford. Bennett says, “[The play draws] on some of the...
The Garden of Forking Paths is a collection of eight short stories by Borges, published in late 1941 by the Argentinian journal Sur. It is the most famous collection of his work, in particular because of its title story, which gained international...
Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. At this point, Dahl had been writing for some time and his timeless work James and the Giant Peach had already been published. This novel, however, is Dahl’s most well known. It is...
Milos Forman's film, Amadeus, was critically acclaimed and a commercial success upon its release in 1984. At the 57th Academy Awards, the film won eight of the eleven nominations that it received. The wins included Best Director, Best Actor (F....
We is the most renowned work of Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin and one of the most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century.
Although the novel was completed in 1921 and published in the US in 1924, it was not published in its country of...
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is perhaps Joyce Carol Oates most widely read and anthologized short story, and, as one critic wrote, “justly so” (Gale 257). First published in the 1996 edition of the journal Epoch and later reprinted...
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is one of Samuel Johnson’s most famous works and his only novel. Styled as a parable or essay as much as a novel (it has been referred to, at times, as a “moral fable,” a “philosophical romance,” and a...
The Sandman, written in in 1817, is one of Hoffmann's most well known stories.
Sigmund Freud gave an interpretation of the story in his essay "The Uncanny," written almost 100 years later in 1919. The essay uses the story to help define a literary...
D.H. Lawrence spent the last five years of his life in Europe, mostly in Italy, where he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. He had left England in 1919, following a stance of non-participation in World War I. (He was deemed physically unfit to be...
The Portrait of a Lady is considered one of Henry James' best works, and it was his first large commercial success. The book was published in serial installments simultaneously in MacMillan's Magazine (in England) and the Atlantic. Up until this...
First published in 1861, Utilitarianism constituted Mill's fullest treatment of the moral theory that was responsible for much of his philosophy. Following in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham, in this work Mill provides the capstone paper outlining...
Seabiscuit is the story of a very unlikely champion race horse and the three men who worked tirelessly to help him fulfil his deeply hidden potential. He was undersized with a lopsided gallop and a combative attitude when it came to being trained....
Dave Eggers is an American novelist born on March 12, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in a very scholarly and academia-focused family as his father was an attorney and his mother a teacher. After graduating high school, he attended...
Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Grey on January 31, 1872. Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship and studied dentistry. It was his dream, however, to become a writer. Grey taught himself how to write and worked...
Between 1854 and 1929, "orphan trains" transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned and homeless children from the coastal cities of the eastern United States to the Midwest for "adoption". Many of these children were first...
Published on May 14, 2013, Inferno is a thrilling mystery written by Dan Brown, starring the protagonist Robert Langdon again, making Inferno the fourth book in that series, along with Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol....
The Nightingale explores the stories of two sisters living in Nazi-occupied France and their involvement in the Resistance, a movement that swept through the nation of France following the German occupation through the end of the war. The...
The Christian book Heaven Is for Real was published in 2010 and became a New York Times bestseller. Later, in 2014, a feature film based on the book debuted and earned $101 million at the box office. It tells the true story of the author’s son,...
The Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter franchise (excluding Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) written by J. K. Rowling. It's a phenomenal conclusion to this epic saga and was published by Bloomsbury...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth and penultimate novel of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series. The book series about a young wizard who is set to defeat a dark wizard named Lord Voldemort, who killed his parents when he was...
As a young boy, Louis Zamperini was a delinquent, uncontrollable and incorrigible. He broke into homes, was constantly fighting and was a serial runaway. As a teenager he channeled his delinquency into running on the track, discovering a talent...
Fifty Shades Freed is the third and final book of the Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James. Fifty Shades follows the relationship of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. Christian introduces to Anastasia to the world of BDSM. The novel picks up...