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.
The Inheritance of Loss is author Kiran Desai's second novel, published in 2006 by Atlantic Monthly Press and Hamish Hamilton. The Inheritance of Loss won numerous accolades, including the 2006 Booker Prize, the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award,...
Les Belles-Soeurs is a two-act play by Canadian writer Michael Tremblay. Written in a naturalistic style, the story follows one night in the home of Germaine Lauzon, a housewife who is hosting a small get-together. The course of the evening...
Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed was published in 1974 to great acclaim; it is considered a landmark work of social history and a core part of the extensive body of work on the Salem Witch Trials. They root the...
Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist was initially published by Simon and Schuster in September 2009. A horror novel written for young adults, Yancey's novel is presented as entries in the diary of a young man and orphan named Will Henry, the...
Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) is a silent film about Chaplin's iconic Tramp character raising a child he finds abandoned. Chaplin wrote, produced, and starred in the film, which was his feature-length directorial debut.
The film begins with a...
Jerry Craft's New Kid is a graphic novel about a Black seventh grader who struggles to adjust to the upscale, mostly white private school in which his mother has enrolled him. New Kid made headlines in 2021 when a Texas school district pulled the...
Burnt Shadows is a novel by Pakistani-British novelist Kamila Shamsie. Published in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing, the novel follows two families over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Set in World War II, the partition of...
Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances is science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....
The Chairs is an absurdist play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, first performed in 1952. It details the life of an unnamed, elderly married couple as they attempt to organize a speech and look back on their life together.
The play...
John Dryden (1631-1700) was one of seventeenth-century England's best-known writers. Known for poetry, prose, drama, criticism, and translation, Dryden today remains beloved as a writer of satire in particular. He is also remembered for developing...
"How to Triumph Like a Girl" is the opening poem from Ada Limón's 2015 book Bright Dead Things. The poem is a celebration of female triumph as the speaker finds kinship between her body and the wild, animal power of racehorses. In the years...
"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is anthropologist and ethnologist Clifford Geertz's seminal work. Originally published in his book The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973, the essay is today the most recognizable of the collection. The...
Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Dr. Seuss wrote more classic books than perhaps any other children's author. Among those classic books is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which tells the story of the eponymous Grinch, a mean and...
San Andreas (2015) is a natural-disaster thriller about a search-and-rescue pilot who saves his daughter and reconciles with his ex-wife amid the chaos of the world's most destructive earthquake as it strikes the West Coast of the United States....
Gail Giles' Shattering Glass was initially published by Roaring Book Press in 2001. The novel is set over the course of one school year and is told from the perspective of a high school senior named Young Stewart, who is a member of the "in crowd"...
Italian director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (or "The Sweet Life") was released in 1960. Set across seven days and nights and in Rome, Italy, La Dolce Vita follows a young man named Marcello Rubini. Disillusioned with his life, Marcello walks...
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” is a characteristically witty poem by the English poet and scholar A.E. Housman. Housman was born in 1859, and wrote most of his poetry in the late nineteenth century. Although today he is best known for his poetry,...
Carpentaria is a 2006 novel by Alexis Wright about the tortured relations between white settlers and the Aboriginal Black community in the remote mudflats of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Queensland, Australia. The novel centers around...
Ada Limón's poem "Wife" appears in her 2018 book, The Carrying. The speaker reflects on her lingering discomforts with the word, "wife," and how it implies a restrictive domestic role and rigid archetype. She expressed her distaste for and...
First published in 1988, The Devil's Arithmetic is a historical fiction novel by Jane Yolen. The story revolves around Hannah Stern, a Jewish girl living in New Rochelle, New York. Tired of hearing her older relatives talk about the past,...
T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone is a fantasy novel about Wart, a fatherless young boy who is mentored by the wizard Merlyn and has various adventures that prepare him to become king. First published in 1938, it is the first book in White's The...
Jason Reynolds' Long Way Down is a 2017 young-adult novel about a fifteen-year-old who sets out to avenge his brother's fatal shooting and encounters several ghosts who make him question his resolve.
Written in verse and narrated by Will Holloman,...
Ada Limón's poem "Dead Stars" was published in her 2018 book The Carrying. In it, the speaker observes stars in the night sky, thinks about the idea that humans are comprised of stardust, and imagines how people might rise to their full potential...
