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.
Everything I Never Told You is the debut novel from Chinese-American author, Celeste Ng. The story begins with the drowning of Lydia Lee, a Chinese-American girl growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1970s. As the local police investigate the...
Hag-Seed is a 2016 novel by the prolific novelist Margaret Atwood and is the seventh book in Hogarth's "Hogarth Shakespeare" series. Like the other novels of the series, it is a standalone retelling of one of Shakespeare's classics.
In Hag-Seed, ...
The Book of Mrs Noah is a novel by French-English author Michele Roberts. It is the story of a woman who visits Venice and begins to imagine that she is Noah's wife. The trip becomes less of a vacation and more of a journey of self-exploration and...
Steve Kowit was born June 30, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. Kowit is best known for his lively poetry. On his website, he jokes about the boredom of poetry readings and claims that his are "lively, entertaining, and passionate".
Over the course of...
The phrase "los vendidos" has two meanings when translated into English; "the sold ones", and "the sellouts". Neither translation speaks highly of the central characters in this one-act play by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez; the play takes a...
Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874. The fourth of Thomas Hardy’s novels, it marked a turning point in his career as his first major success; it was the second novel which he published under his own name (his first two...
Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 surrealist silent short film directed by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and co-written by Buñuel and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. Despite its brevity—at its original frame rate, it runs just over sixteen...
Released in 2006, Babel is an ensemble film written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is a complex non-linear drama that is the last in Iñárritu's "Death Trilogy" which includes Amores Perros and 21 Grams. It...
Much like many of von Trier's films, Melancholia (2011) is an exceedingly bizarre and unique film. The film follows two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively) who have a strained relationship. However, once...
Despite the fact that Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” is one of the author's more anthologized works, not many readers are aware that this is actually a sequel to a previous story writtin in 1892 called "At the 'Cadian Ball." The central characters...
Proof is a play by American playwright David Auburn. After a development process at George Street Playhouse, the play premiered in 2000 Off Broadway, then transferred to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre a few months later. It was directed by...
Reading Teju Cole's debut novel Open City is really not like reading a novel at all; it is more like reading a journal or a travelogue written for the writer to look back on themselves and use as an aide memoir when wanting to go back over a trip...
Shreds of Tenderness is a 2001 play by Ugandan playwright John Ruganda. It explores themes of greed, individualism, and betrayal on a familial and national level and features conflict over everything from crops to political power.
The play takes...
Gurinder Chadha's Bridge and Prejudice (released in the United Kingdom in 2004 and the United States in 2005) is a Bollywood-style remake of Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice. The film follows four unmarried daughters in an Indian family....
Widely renowned as one of the greatest writers of our modern era, Haruki Murakami wrote After the Quake after the catastrophic Kobe earthquake in 1995. The collection of short stories was first published in Japan in 2000, with an English...
Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a freelance reporter who is recording the violent events taking place in the middle of the night in downtown Los Angeles, and sending them to the local television news station. He is an ambulance chaser,...
In 1995, Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton first worked together in the blockbuster smash Apollo 13, but despite the movie's success, and the two actors' obvious on-screen compatibility, they did not work together again for another twenty two years, when...
“Sure Thing” is a short romantic comedy written by the American playwright David Ives. It debuted at Manhattan Punch Line’s Festival of One-Act Comedies in 1988. This play was one part of Ives’ collection of six short plays called All in the...
T2 Trainspotting (2017) is the sequel to 1996's smash-hit Trainspotting (which made $72 million against a budget of only $1.7 million). It stars many of the actors from the first film (like Ewan McGregor, who reprised his role as Mark Renton) and...
West Side Story is the 1961 film adaptation of the wildly successful stage musical which had taken Broadway by storm just a few years earlier. The film was co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, who made history by becoming the first pair...
In 1960, French author Albert Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident. Prior to his death, Camus published a number of great works like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He was also working a brand new novel entitled The First Man,...
Nathaniel Hawthorn owes the writing of his last novel, The Marble Faun, to the fact that Franklin Pierce was such an incompetent President that even today, more than 150 years and 30 contenders later, he still consistently ranks among the five...
Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was a satirical political film produced, directed, written , starring, and scored by the famed British actor and comedian, Charlie Chaplin. The film makes fun of the Nazi Regime in Germany, which was at its...
Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son,...