Newest Study Guides

Written by prolific Australian playwright Alex Buzo, Norm and Ahmed (1968) was the subject of a tremendous amount of controversy when it was released. Originally, the play ended with the line "f*cking boong," an ethnic slur. The actor who used...

Baldwin's 1965 collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, is comprised mostly of stories he previously published between 1948 and 1960. The stories touch on themes of sexuality, class, and race, in particular the experience of black...

Directed and written by Rian Johnson (best known for Looper and Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Knives Out (2019) is a mystery following Ana De Armas’ Marta, a nurse who is tasked with caring for and accompanying Christopher Plummer’s Harlan, a mystery...

Written by the prolific English playwright George Lillo, The London Merchant (first performed in 1731) tells the darkly tragic story of the downfall of a young man because he has associated himself with a prostitute named Sarah Millwood. Lillo's...

Joker is a film directed, produced, and written by Todd Phillips (his cowriter was Scott Silver). It is based around the DC Comics villain The Joker and stars Joaquin Phoenix as the title character. Phillips cites Martin Scorsese's films Taxi...

O. Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf" is about a young artist named Johnsy who falls victim to a pneumonia epidemic that hits New York City. As Johnsy counts the ivy leaves falling off the vine outside her window, she superstitiously...

Poet Juan Felipe Herrera has been publishing poetry for almost four decades, and most of his body of work is represented in his poem Half the World in Light. Like all of his previous poems, its central theme is the Chicano experience in the United...

Richard Wagamese published Medicine Walk in 2014. Wagamese was an acclaimed First Nations Ojibway author most notably known for his novel Indian Horse, which was adapted into a film in 2017.

Medicine Walk is told from the perspective of Franklin...

In her memoir entitled Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (released in 2012), author Deborah Feldman discusses her early life in an incredibly religious Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. She chronicles not only her life...

The Winter of Our Discontent was published in 1961 by John Steinbeck and was the last novel he wrote. The novel gets its title from Richard III, a play written by William Shakespeare:

"Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by...

Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning is a play about a man named Thomas Mendip. Thomas is a discharged soldier who wants to commit suicide but ultimately doesn't. Later on, Thomas meets with the mayor and is about to hang himself but,...

Michèle Marineau's 1992 novel The Road to Chlifa follows Karim Nakad, a seventeen-year-old refugee from the Lebanese civil war, as he faces discrimination in his new life in Montreal, Canada while grappling with the haunting memories of his...

Called a "publishing phenomenon" by the L.A. Times, The Art of Racing in the Rain is the award-winning third novel by American author, filmmaker, and amateur car-racer Garth Stein. Published by HarperCollins in 2008, the novel remained on the New...

"Beverly Hills, Chicago" first appeared in 1949, in Brooks' second collection of poetry, Annie Allen. The poem describes the speaker's experience driving through the affluent white neighborhood of Beverly, Chicago, as someone who is neither...

"We Real Cool" first appeared in Gwendolyn Brooks' third published collection of poetry entitled, The Bean Eaters, in which she continues to explore her primary theme, the experiences of Black people in America. Though she had always been writing...

"The Bean Eaters" is the title poem of Gwendolyn Brooks' third collection of poetry, published by Harpers in 1960. The poem describes an aging Black couple's ritual of sitting down and eating beans on their old, chipped plates while they silently...

D. H. Lawrence composed “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” in the winter of 1916 and completed it in January of the next year under the title “The Miracle.” The manuscript was tinkered with and revised and, of course, retitled before finally being...

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third novel in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In this book, the saga continues as Harry is faced with dementors, the soul-sucking guards of Azkaban prison that bring icy depression into the...

The 57 Bus began as an article for the New York Times Magazine, published in 2015. But the whole time Slater crafted the article and researched the case, she fantasized "writing the story in a different way, for a different audience." Slater knew...

Published in September of 1989, Bharati Mukherjee's third novel, Jasmine, tells the story of its eponymous protagonist's journey from the small village of Hasnapur, India to Jalandhar, to Florida, to New York, and eventually to Iowa, inhabiting a...

Annihilation is a darkly complex novel from author Jeff VanderMeer, the first installment of his Southern Reach Trilogy. It seems to defy categorization: it is at once speculative fiction, science fiction, thriller, and horror, while also being...

"The Lady with the Dog" was written in 1899 by Russian writer and playwright Anton Chekhov, and was first published in the journal Russian Idea. It has often been deemed by critics to be Chekhov's answer to Anna Karenina; Lyudmila Parts calls it...

Phillip Pullman published The Golden Compass, known as Northern Lights outside of North America, in 1995. The novel is the first book in what would become a trilogy entitled His Dark Materials, which also includes The Subtle Knife and The Amber...

Robert Cormier's Eight Plus One: Stories is about a seventeen-year-old boy named Mike who goes to visit his grandmother's house. Mike's grandmother is about to die, the grandmother invites him so she can tell him the family secrets. Some secrets...