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.
The Diaries of Adam & Eve were, at first, two separate short stories written by American author, Mark Twain. The first one, Adam's Diary, was first published in 1893 and the second one, Eve's Diary, in 1906. The two tales were reunited in...
The Demon in the Freezer is a non-fiction book about the metaphorical "demon" referring to biological weapons and the US government's measures to counter them. It was published in 2002 and was written by journalist Richard Preston.
The book...
The Cyberiad is a collection of science fiction stories by Stanislaw Lem, a Polish author who wrote them in the 60's, even though it was already 1974 by the time the were translated into English from their original Polish.
As far as the science...
Joanne Harris is the author of Chocolat, the first installment of her Chocolat book series, which consists of three books. The second and third books are The Girl with No Shadow and Peaches for Father Francis. This romance fiction novel was first...
Written in 1980, Animal Dreams is a novel written by American writer Barbara Kingsolver. Like in her previous novels, Animal Dreams focuses on the relationship between man and nature and it also focuses of the idea of social justice. Her novels...
Breaking Dawn is the last installment in the Twilight Saga – the love triangle between a human, vampire and werewolf/shape-shifter. The cover of the novel is a metaphor of Bella’s journey. She began as the weakest member on the chessboard – the...
Windward Heights is a novel written by the French author Maryse Conde and published in the year 2008. The author writes in predominately in French but her books have been translated in various languages and made available to the public. Maryse is...
Where Angels Fear to Tread is a novel written by E. M. Forster. The title comes from a line in Alexander Pope’s An Essay of Criticism: “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, but at first Forster wanted to title his novel Monteriano, after...
Tonio Kroger is a novel written by Thomas Mann and published in 1903. This work was the first one that Mann published. Tonio Kroger creates a pair with Death in Venice, a more famous story, because both tell of an artist’s life and his travels....
Gertrude Stein gave her second published collection of poetry the title Tender Buttons in 1914. The poems which make up the collection inside are every bit as offbeat and unexpected as the title. Of course, the literary world has another name for...
Written as a series of mysterious and reflective journal entries, The Seducer's Diary is the first-person narrative of Johannes, a self-identified seducer who takes not so much carnal pleasure as a peculiar delight in the tempting, attracting,...
Reveries of a Bachelor is a novel written by Donald Grant Mitchell that was published in 1850. It was published under Mitchell’s pseudonym Ik Marvel. A reverie is an abstract musing or just a train of thought, and the “reveries” are divided into...
Reflections on the Revolution in France is a pamphlet written by Edmund Burke that was published in 1790. One of the best known intellectual attacks against the politics of and the French Revolution in general, Reflections is a markstone that...
J.D. Salinger wrote the two novellas that are included in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Both were previously published in The New Yorker, with the titles “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An...
The Pyramid is a novel about a man called Oliver and his experience of finding himself and the true meaning of life. The plot is set in a small town Stillbourne, and Oliver's story is divided in three parts. The narrator is Oliver and his...
Somewhere there is a thesaurus with an entry on unappreciated that includes the synonym Herman Melville. One might well forward the proposition that what Vincent Van Gogh was to the world of art, Herman Melville is the world of fiction. At least...
Ovid was an ancient Roman poet living from the 20th of March, 43 BC, to 17 or 18 CE. First published in 16 BC, the Amores was Ovid's first completed book of poetry. Originally, the poems had been published in five books, but Ovid later edited them...
Harriet Wilson was a groundbreaking African-American writer, whose work Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was among the first novels published by African Americans. Wilson was born Harriet E. Adams in 1825 to an Irish mother and...
On the Genealogy of Morals is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher that was born on October 15,1844 and died on August 24,1900. This book was one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s more famous pieces of work...
Published in 1972, My Name is Asher Lev is Chaim Potok’s third novel. Like his best-selling debut The Chosen, the story creates drama from the conflict between Orthodox and secular Judaism. Set predominantly in the Crown Heights section of...
All things considered, it is nothing less than astonishing that most people are not familiar with Eliza Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. Even those who never read a book have at least heard of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Those...
Libra is a 1988 work of speculative fiction by Don DeLillo which tells the story of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The work began as a piece of straightforward non-fiction by DeLillo published five years earlier in Rolling...
The Lady from Shanghai may be the only film noir in made expressly in order to pay back a personal loan. That loan was made to Orson Welles by Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn under terms in which payback would include a movie directed by Welles....
According to the author himself, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was just 16 years old when he witnessed an encounter between an 11-year-old prostitute and her grandmother. Many decades later that prostitute would age by a few years and become the...
