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.
Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks was originally published in serial form in 1865 and as a novel in 1866. Oliphant's novel follows the eponymous Lucilla Marjoribanks, an aristocratic woman forced to live in the backward English town of...
Alice Munro was born in 1931 in Laidlaw, Canada. Monroe specialized in writing English short stories. In 2013, Munro won the prestigious Nobel Prize in literature. Other notable awards won by Munro include the Governor's General Award (1968, 1978,...
Author Sharon Creech's Love That Dog was first published in 2001 by HarperCollins. Written in free verse in the form of daily diary entries, Creech's novel tells the story of a young boy named Jack. At the start of Love That Dog, Jack is portrayed...
It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover is a romance novel published in 2016 by Atria Publishers Limited. The central character is Lily Bloom, and the novel is about the doomed relationship between her parents and her failed marriage with Ryle Kincaid....
Frank Herbert is among the most widely read and celebrated science fiction authors ever. In 1965's Dune, Herbert wrote one of the most enduring science fiction novels ever. The follow-up to that novel is entitled Dune Messiah and was published in...
James McBride's Deacon King Kong was first published in March 2020 by Riverhead Books. The novel, which is set in Brooklyn, New York in 1969, tells the story of an old church deacon who is known as Sportcoat. One day, Sportcoat takes a gun out of...
Neuromancer, written by William Gibson and published in 1984, is a science fiction novel best known for being one of the first examples of the "cyberpunk" genre. Upon publication, Neuromancer received critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award,...
Though Irish poet Dylan Thomas didn't survive to see his 40th birthday, he is responsible for some of the world's most famous poems. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" is one such poem. First published in 1945 in Horizon...
Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo" is a poem initially published in Poetry magazine in May 1919. It was subsequently republished as part of her 1922 collection A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets. Millay was inspired to write the poem...
"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" is a poem by Edward Lear. It was originally published 1870 in Our Young Folks: an Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls. One year later Lear would republish the verse in his collection titled Nonsense Songs, Stories,...
John Keats was one of the most recognized poets of the early 18th century. Keats rose to the helm of English Romantic Poetry at an early age. Despite Keats’ premature death at the age of 25, he left a rich legacy in poetry as a “romantic poet.”...
At its core, Vernon Scannell's "Nettles" is a poem about the trials and tribulations of being a parent. Primarily, it is a poem about the way that parents protect their children throughout their lives in different ways. The poem is told from the...
Alfred E. Housman was born in 1859 in England. Housman grew up under his mother's tender care at the Perry Garden until age 12, when she died. While growing up, Housman developed a good relationship with the cherry tree outside their garden....
W.H. Auden was a British-American well-known for his poems on topics like morality, love, and, in the case of "Epitaph on a Tyrant," which was published in 1940, politics. "Epitaph on a Tyrant" is a poem creating the epitaph after the death of an...
"The Dong with a Luminous Nose" is a poem, which was first published in 1877 as a part of Victorian poet Edward Lear's collection titled Laughable Lyrics. Lear is best known for his nonsensical works of literature, but particularly his poems. "The...
Renowned English poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) was well-known for her lyrical and approachable poetry. Her poetry frequently addresses issues of faith, human relationships' intricacies, and personal experience. Her well-known poem "Absence"...
Australian author Tim Winton has had a life that few ever dream of. He details those experiences in The Boy Behind the Curtain, which was published in 2016 and chronicles his life from birth to the present day—and everything in between....
Arc of Justice is a non-fiction work published to great acclaim by Kevin Boyle in 2004. In telling the specific story of Ossian Sweet, the book shines a spotlight on the history of systemic racism in America's real estate superstructure. Boyle...
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by critically celebrated British writer W. Somerset Maugham. The novel follows the life of Charles Strickland, a businessman who devotes the remainder of his life to painting in an effort to become a great artist....
"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, first published in 1897 before appearing in Yeats's 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. The poem describes Aengus—an Irish god of youth, poetry, and love—entering the...
The title page of the 1615 edition of Kyd's celebrated play reads:
The Spanish Tragedie:or, Hieronimo is mad againe.
In its day, The Spanish Tragedy was anonymous. Only in 1773 did the theatrical historian Thomas Hawkins discover, in Thomas...
Jason Reynolds's Ghost (2016) is a young-adult novel about Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw, a middle-schooler who joins a track team as a sprinter and develops greater behavioral discipline as he trains.
At twelve, Castle lives in an impoverished...
A Thousand Ships, which was first published in 2020, is author Natalie Haynes' retelling of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women who fought in it. The Trojan war, like all of the wars which preceded it and all of the wars which came...
Spare, Prince Harry's memoir (ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer, the critically acclaimed author of The Tender Bar) published to tremendous fanfare in early January 2023, was one of the most anticipated works of non-fiction in the past several...