Newest Study Guides

"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...

Dead Souls is a novel by celebrated Russian author Nikolai Gogol. First published in 1842, it details the quest of a bureaucrat named Chichikov to purchase the names of deceased serfs in a scheming effort to acquire land and wealth. Gogol claimed...

Harold Pinter's The Room is a tragicomic play about an anxious woman whose humble life is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious messenger whose presence portends death. Written in 1957, The Room was Pinter's first play.

Living in a single-room...

"First Death in Nova Scotia" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. First appearing in The New Yorker in 1962, and then in the 1965 collection Questions of Travel, this work explores themes of death...

Warriors Don't Cry is a nonfiction memoir published by Melba Pattillo Beals in 1994. The book is set in the 1950s and 1960s, using entries from Beals' diary to recount her experiences as part of the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine African...

Although Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps better known for his Gothic short stories (such as "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Fall of the House of Usher") than for his poetry, a number of his poetic works have gained popularity in the popular...

In Wild (2012), Cheryl Strayed wrote one of the most financially successful memoirs ever. Strayed published another book in 2012 called Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of self-help essays she wrote anonymously on the website of The Rumpus, a...

Set in 1937 and starring Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski's neo-noir film Chinatown (1974) is about a private investigator who uncovers a conspiracy involving corrupt management of the Los Angeles water supply. The film was inspired by a series of...

The Jew of Malta was composed around 1590, shortly after the death of the Duke of Guise in 1588, to which the prologue alludes. Its first recorded performance took place on February 26, 1592, by the Lord Strange's Men. Another followed on March 10...

Emily Dickinson, the renowned American poet, is widely celebrated as one of the most important literary figures of all time. Among her many masterpieces is "A Murmur in the Trees—to note—," a poem likely written in 1862, but not published until...

Claude McKay published his poem “The White House” in 1922. It appeared alongside three other poems in a collection titled “Spring Sonnets,” published in The Liberator, an American communist magazine. The poem utilizes the sonnet form which,...

"Beach Burial" is a poem by Kenneth Slessor that details a scene from a World War II battle in Egypt that Slessor witnessed in 1942. Slessor worked as a war correspondent during World War II, which offered him an opportunity to see the world...

It would be fair to say that American author Ann Napolitano is one of the most widely read and important authors of her time. Hello Beautiful, Napolitano's fourth novel inspired by Little Women and first published in 2023, cements her legacy as...

Shame is a novel written by author Salman Rushdie, first published in 1983. Set in the fictional town of Q. in the imaginary country "Peccavistan"—based on Quetta, in Pakistan—the book follows the intersection of various lives during a turbulent...

The Mysterious Benedict Society, which was published in 2007, is the first novel in author Trenton Lee Stewart's quartet of children's novels called "The Mysterious Benedict Society." The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) follows four children...

English author Philip Reeve began his career as an illustrator, something which is reflected in his writing style. Unlike some other writers, Reeve doesn't plan before he writes. Instead, he starts writing with an opening and closing image in...

Few know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work outside of his most famous character: Sherlock Holmes. But Doyle was a prolific writer who crafted some of the best short stories in existence. One such short story is called "How It Happened," which was...

"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to...

Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in six monthly installments in 1996. It tells the story of a death-row supervisor named Paul Edgecombe, who one day encounters a prisoner with extraordinary powers named John Coffey....

Stay True was published in September of 2022. In addition to describing Hsu's maturation as a young Asian American man, the memoir is centered on the death of Hsu's friend Ken, who was killed while they were both students at Berkeley. In tender...

"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the...

The Vendor of Sweets is a novel by critically acclaimed Indian author R.K. Narayan. Set in India during the 1960s, It follows the life of a vendor of sweetmeats named Jagan as he tries to navigate a difficult relationship with his son Mali.

Set in...

Where the Crawdads Sing, published in 2018, tells the story of a 1950s North Carolina town that accuses the mysterious "Marsh Girl," Kya Clark, of a local celebrity's murder. According to author Delia Owens, the text explores " how isolation...

Marlowe lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....