Newest Study Guides

Catching Fire is the second book in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy, published by Scholastic Press in 2009 between The Hunger Games and Mockingjay. The novel begins a few months after protagonist Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart, Peeta...

Many critics describe Blood Meridian as one of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is a revisionist Western in which McCarthy explores the era after the Mexican-American War. During this time, vigilante, mercenary gangs patrolled the...

Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 non-fiction book Blink is about how people use their adaptive unconscious – the part of the brain that operates rapidly based upon little information – to make important decisions. Gladwell considers how and why some people...

After retiring from teaching writing at a variety of New York City high schools, Frank McCourt was determined to write about his early life in Ireland before coming to America. The result, Angela's Ashes, was published in 1996 by Scribner and sold...

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is a book of media ecology written by educator and media theorist Neil Postman. It has remained both popular and in-print since it was first published in 1986. The book...

Gennifer Albin's second novel, Altered, explores one girl's experience navigating the dysfunctional social and political systems of a completely controlled dystopian society. Published in 2013, Altered is the second book in the Crewel World...

All the Light We Cannot See was written by Anthony Doerr in 2014 and was published by Scribner. All the Light We Cannot See was Doerr's fifth novel.

The inspiration for the novel came when Doerr was on a trip with a friend whose cell phone broke....

Bleak House was begun at Tavistock House, Dickens' London home, in November 1851, continued at Dover, and completed at Boulogne in August 1853. It was originally published in nineteen monthly parts, the last of which was double the size of the...

Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in 1877. It was to be her first and only book. Sewell, who grew up in Quaker family of north England, was an invalid for most of her life. Since she could not stand for long periods of time, she learned how to ride...

Big Fish is a 2003 movie directed by Tim Burton. It tells the story of a Paris-based journalist named Will Bloom who comes home to Ashton, Alabama, when he hears that his father, Edward, is terminally ill with cancer and has been taken off...

Bicycle Thieves (often listed under the title The Bicycle Thief) is a landmark 1948 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film was adapted from Luigi Bartolini’s novel of the same name by Cesare Zavattini, who was one of De...

First published in 1946, All the King's Men was directly influenced by Robert Penn Warren's firsthand experiences with fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy and radical populism in governor Huey P. Long's Louisiana.

In 1934, in the middle of the...

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the fundamental texts of Hinduism, and documents the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna as Arjuna prepares to go into battle against the Kauravas for battle of the kingdom of Hastinapura.

The Gita is written in...

Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers (2018) explores the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The novel follows a man named Yale Tishman, who works at an art gallery and is on the cusp of bringing a collection of extraordinary 1920s paintings and drawings...

Daniel Ellsberg was once a nuclear war planner and presidential advisor (as the title suggests). In The Doomsday Machine, published in 2017, Ellsberg provides an in-depth look at nuclear armaments in the world and how the U.S. uses it. Ellsberg...

Published in 1992 and written by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man is a book detailing the events after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. In his book, Fukuyama claims that this marks the end...

Published in 2016 by award-winning American author, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad is a gripping account of a runaway slave, Cora, as she makes her way through a fictionalized American landscape. Throughout her journey to freedom, Cora...

The Trojan Women, also known as the Troades, was composed by the Greek playwright Euripides in 415 B.C.E. in response to the Athenian massacre on the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. Melos had been attempting to maintain its...

Amy Tan is best known for her novels and children's books, but she has also written several short stories, published both formally and informally. Her most popular short story is "Fish Cheeks", which is a true story published in 1987. The story...

All Our Relations is a 2018 non-fictional book examining the effects of past genocides on indigenous youth in North America. Recent studies have indicated that one out of three deaths among young indigenous people is due to suicide, likely because...

David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) tells the story of the sex lives of four people: two men (Dan Shapiro and Bernard Litko) and two women (Deborah Soloman and Joan Webber) as they try to successfully swing. The story is profane and...

The key to Nick Hornby's success as a novelist in his home country of Great Britain is the fact that he presents himself as an "ordinary bloke" and not, per se, an academic, or a writer-type, on in fact anybody but a fanatical soccer fan who got...

Looking for Richard is a 1996 film directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Al Pacino. It is an exploration of Pacino's love for Shakespeare, particularly Shakespeare's Richard III, and it playfully intersperses documentary-style interviews with...

David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014) is based on the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the films screenplay). The film chronicles the story of Amy (played masterfully by Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (played by Ben Affleck) after...