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.
Ghostwritten is a 1999 drama novel written by David Mitchell. It was published by Holder and Stoughton and won several prizes. The book is David’s debut novel, and many of his next books were written in the same fashion and universe as ...
Growing up in the 1800s in a wealthy, upper class English family, Helen Beatrix Potter led a cocooned and isolated childhood in a large, sprawling home; she was a lonely child who was also intrigued by the world around her, particularly in the...
Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was a huge success when it was published on November 18, 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It established Twain’s reputation as a humorist with a great ear for regional...
A Dance of the Forests is one of Wole Soyinka's best-known plays and was commissioned as part of a larger celebration of Nigerian independence. It was a polarizing play that made many Nigerians angry at the time of its production, specifically...
"Inland Passage" and Other Stories is a 1985 collection of short fiction by Canadian author Jane Rule. Famous for her exploration of LGBT (and specifically Lesbian) themes in her writings, Rule continues to explore same-sex relationships between...
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel that explores the life of Elizabeth as she grows from a young girl to an adult. As a child, she is teased because she is fat, and is scarred forever because of it. Her childhood friend, named Mel, seems...
One never knows what one might find by having a good rummage at an estate sale; at one such sale, one attendee discovered an antique manuscript that revealed itself to be The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the first known memoir penned...
"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1843 in an edition of the long-running periodical The Saturday Evening Post and subsequently included in The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1845). The short story is acclaimed for its probing of...
Due to unprecedented and tight budget constraints, Dallas Buyers' Club was shot in just twenty-five days, with no rehearsals or read-throughs, no customary lighting set-ups, hand-held cameras for scenes of less than fifteen minutes in length and...
The Day the Earth Stood Still is arguably director Robert Wise's first masterpiece in a career that had quite a few (The Sound of Music and West Side Story, to name a few). It tells the story of an alien named Klaatu and his eight-foot robot named...
I, Robot was directed by Alex Proyas with a screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman suggested by the book by Isaac Asimov. It was produced by Michael Lee Baron, John Davis, Topher Dow, Wyck Godfrey and Laurence Mark. The film was made for a...
Neruda wrote “Ode to My Suit” (“Oda al Traje”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, socks, and a watch. The "Odes"—around two hundred and fifty in all—also paid tribute to particular people....
“The Book of Questions III” is one of seventy-four poems contained in Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions" (“El libro de las preguntas”). Thought of another way, “III” is four questions in a book of 316. Each poem, or question, can be read...
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is a Modernist poem written in free verse with occasional rhymes. The major conflict in the poem is between nature, represented by the moon, and culture, represented by the city. It explores themes of memory and fate.
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"Journey of the Magi" was the first poem that T.S. Eliot wrote after his baptism into the Anglican church on July 29, 1927. From that point on, almost everything he wrote propagated the Christian faith. This poem was first published in 1927 by his...
T.S. Eliot wrote "Preludes" between 1910 and 1911 while he was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then in Paris. The poem was included in Eliot's breakout 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Poems, but it was first published in the second...
Neruda wrote “Ode to My Socks” (“Oda a los calcetines”) as part of a larger project to praise ordinary objects such as salt, an onion, a lemon, wine, clothes, and a watch. The Odes, around two hundred and fifty in all, also paid tribute to...
T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1923, five years after World War I ended in 1918. At the time, Eliot lived as an American expatriate in London, England. His poetry of the 1920s responded to the aftermath of the war, especially its effect on...
It has been said that the nineteenth century was the century when sexuality, and sexual identity, was first invented, which is also when this collection of short stories, all detailing the sexual predilections of a selection of "queer" characters,...
Perhaps what is most interesting about Hal Ashby's 1971 film Harold and Maude is how long it took to get an audience. Since its release, the film has gained the reputation as a "cult classic" -- or a book or movie that is popular amongst a certain...
Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) write a vast number of novels and short stories, often under pen names such as William Irish. He hit his stride in the 1940’s with a series of novels and stories that redefined the concept of the American crime story....
There is a saying that goes, "Wherever you go, there you are" - meaning that people do not change just because their geographical location has. The essay demonstrates the truth in this saying only too well and shows that escaping from gangs,...
Nominated for two Academy Awards, Into the Wild is a film based on the true story of student athlete Christopher McCandless, who gives up all his possessions, donates his life savings of almost twenty five thousand dollars to charity, and...
The Night Circus is a novel by writer and multimedia artist Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011, it was the author's debut novel. She has acknowledged debts to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige...