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.
"Beach Burial" is a poem by Kenneth Slessor that details a scene from a World War II battle in Egypt that Slessor witnessed in 1942. Slessor worked as a war correspondent during World War II, which offered him an opportunity to see the world...
Shame is a novel written by author Salman Rushdie, first published in 1983. Set in the fictional town of Q. in the imaginary country "Peccavistan"—based on Quetta, in Pakistan—the book follows the intersection of various lives during a turbulent...
"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to...
Stephen King's The Green Mile was originally published in six monthly installments in 1996. It tells the story of a death-row supervisor named Paul Edgecombe, who one day encounters a prisoner with extraordinary powers named John Coffey....
Stay True was published in September of 2022. In addition to describing Hsu's maturation as a young Asian American man, the memoir is centered on the death of Hsu's friend Ken, who was killed while they were both students at Berkeley. In tender...
"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the...
The Vendor of Sweets is a novel by critically acclaimed Indian author R.K. Narayan. Set in India during the 1960s, It follows the life of a vendor of sweetmeats named Jagan as he tries to navigate a difficult relationship with his son Mali.
Set in...
Where the Crawdads Sing, published in 2018, tells the story of a 1950s North Carolina town that accuses the mysterious "Marsh Girl," Kya Clark, of a local celebrity's murder. According to author Delia Owens, the text explores " how isolation...
Marlowe lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....
Published in 1989, Sexing the Cherry is Jeanette Winterson's third novel. It was preceded by Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and The Passion (1987). Sexing the Cherry incorporates elements of historical fiction, which is an element shared by...
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, first published in 1996, is a satirical novel about a single woman in her thirties who hopes to lose weight, improve her career, eliminate her vices, gain self-control, and find love. Her ambitions are...
Neuromancer, written by William Gibson and published in 1984, is a science fiction novel best known for being one of the first examples of the "cyberpunk" genre. Upon publication, Neuromancer received critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award,...
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by critically celebrated British writer W. Somerset Maugham. The novel follows the life of Charles Strickland, a businessman who devotes the remainder of his life to painting in an effort to become a great artist....
"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, first published in 1897 before appearing in Yeats's 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. The poem describes Aengus—an Irish god of youth, poetry, and love—entering the...
The title page of the 1615 edition of Kyd's celebrated play reads:
The Spanish Tragedie:or, Hieronimo is mad againe.
In its day, The Spanish Tragedy was anonymous. Only in 1773 did the theatrical historian Thomas Hawkins discover, in Thomas...
Jason Reynolds's Ghost (2016) is a young-adult novel about Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw, a middle-schooler who joins a track team as a sprinter and develops greater behavioral discipline as he trains.
At twelve, Castle lives in an impoverished...
"Mean Time" is a poem originally published in Carol Ann Duffy's 1993 collection Mean Time. It describes the experiences of a speaker suffering in the aftermath of a breakup. As the speaker wanders the streets on a winter evening, she muses about...
The Roaring Girl is a fictional dramatization of the real life of Mary Frith, a seventeenth-century virago (or masculine woman) with a reputation for crime, cross-dressing, and general societal insubordination. By the time Frith – later known as...
Jennie Livingston's idea for Paris Is Burning began a number of years before the film's 1990 release. As a photography and painting student from Yale, Livingston became involved in news media after college. It was through this role that she...
Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....
Henry IV, Part One first appeared in print in 1598, when two separate quartos were made. The second quarto serves as the standard text for most modern editions, and was followed closely by five more quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The...
With Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, Blake introduced a new method of printing his own books. Blake would print his poems by hand onto copper plates, illustrate each poem with drawings, and then color the prints by hand. Blake claimed to...
Esperanza Rising was published in 2000. It is the fictional story of Esperanza Ortega, a privileged girl growing up in Mexico on her family's farm. However, her life is shattered when her father is murdered. Esperanza must leave behind her family’...
Throughout the twentieth century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has become famous not only as one of Twain's greatest achievements, but also as a highly controversial piece of literature. In certain Southern states, the novel was banned due...
