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.
Charles Lamb wore many hats as a writer, dedicating his early career to poetry and writing a well known adaptation of Shakespeare's plays for children entitled Tales from Shakespeare. But as an individual writer, Lamb is arguably best known for...
Nissim Ezekiel's collected poems were first anthologized in 1992 by Oxford India Paperbacks. Since then, Oxford University Press has published three impressions and two editions of the anthology. The second edition, published in 2007, contains a...
American author Henry Miller’s Black Spring was written between 1932 and 1933 while he was living in a suburb of Paris. However, the book was not released in the United States until 1963 due to strict obscenity laws. Nevertheless, it covers the...
Published in 1956, Train to Pakistan is Khushwant Singh’s third and most famous work. The novel draws upon Singh’s own experiences during and after the Partition of India in 1947, and details the chaos and violence in the forming of Hindu India...
Wild was first published in 2012. Strayed had already published a novel, numerous essays, and was the author of the successful advice column "Dear Sugar"; however, the extreme success of the memoir drastically altered her career. Wild was an...
James Thurber's 1939 short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," has been adapted for movie audiences twice. In 1947, Danny Kaye played the eponymous role in a version that stayed very loyal to Thurber's story. This 2013 version, starring Ben...
So Long a Letter is a semi-autobiographical novel written in letter format by Mariama Bâ. It is a staple of classic women's literature classes, and also won the Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa in 1980.
The novel centers around the theme of...
Dirty Pretty Things is a 2002 film directed by Stephen Frears and written by Steven Knight about an illegal Nigerian immigrant and doctor, Okwe, who gets embroiled in a London underground organ market being run out of the hotel that employs him....
Room was published in 2010 by Emma Donoghue. It was shortlisted for many awards, including the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Awards in 2010; it was also The New York Times Notable Best Book of the Year, an ALA Notable Book, the Irish...
Me Before You was written by Jojo Moyes in 2012 and was published by Pamela Dorman Books/Viking Publishing. It has sold over 8 million copies and was adapted into a film in 2016. Jojo Moyes, author of the novel, wrote the screenplay for the film...
Sappho was a Grecian singer who performed more than 2,500 years ago. None of her music survives. Of the nine volumes of her poetry that once sat in the library of Alexandria, only two full poems, and a few hundred fragments, remain. Along with her...
Though he is mostly known for his children's fiction, Roald Dahl was also a prolific writer of adult short stories, poetry, screenplays, and memoirs. In fact, Dahl first gained acclaim as an adult short-story writer, and "The Landlady" and Other...
The Secret Garden is a children's novel by British writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. The story centers around a little girl named Mary Lennox who was born in India to wealthy parents. Mary's life in India suddenly comes to...
The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit poem describing the mythical Kurukshetra War between two sets of brothers descended from the king Bharata: the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is considered so historically important to the Hindu tradition that...
The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a comedy of manners in five acts that premiered at Covent Garden Theatre in 1775. It is considered one of Sheridan's best-known works and in addition to receiving many revivals, it has served as an...
Andy Weir self-published The Martian as an e-book in 2011. An example of "hard sf," in which factual speculation is minimized, The Martian includes scientific descriptions of space-flight, rocketry, thermodynamics, biology, and other phenomena.
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The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. At this time, Doris Lessing was moderately well known as a writer of novels and short stories; Notebook solidified her reputation. It was well regarded but somewhat controversial for its fragmented and...
"Bogland" appears in Seamus Heaney's second collection of poetry, Door Into The Dark (1969), which details Heaney's rural upbringing. "Bogland" is the final poem in the book, which is written with a great deal of attention devoted to evoking...
"Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music" is an ode written by John Dryden. It was written in 1697 in celebration of Saint Cecelia's day. The original ode was set to music by the musician Jeremiah Clarke, but, due to its relative obscurity at the...
Highly controversial in its time, Blasted is British author Sarah Kane's first play. It premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre. It has many shocking and rather gruesome elements, including rape, cannibalism, and suicide, elements which...
The Little Foxes is a play written in 1939 by acclaimed and controversial American dramatist Lillian Hellman. It takes place in a small town in Alabama in 1900 and looks at strained dynamics within a Southern family. The original production...
Kitchen is the novel that truly made Banana Yoshimoto, considered one of Japan’s most esteemed contemporary writers, famous and earned her the acclamation of critics and the public alike. Published in 1987, it rapidly became a bestseller; to date,...
Based on the true story of a female prisoner at the Qanatir Prison in Egypt, Woman at Point Zero is one of Nawal El Saadawi’s most celebrated works. After Egyptian publishers rejected the book because of its radical content, Saadawi had it...
As a key figure in the modernization of Bengali literature, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in every literary form that existed at the time: poetry, drama, prose, memoir, philosophy, musical lyrics. But he didn't write in every form all of the time, and...