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.
What Maisie Knew is an 1897 novel by American/British author Henry James. The story was first published in The Chap-Book and the New Review, two prominent American literary magazines of the time.
The protagonist of the book is Maisie, a young girl...
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (or the original French Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison) is a 1975 work by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. The evolution of Foucault's thought is a complicated...
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is the 1965 abridged translation of Michel Foucault’s 1961 French text, Folie et Déraison. A more recent, unabridged translation has been released by Routledge under the title ...
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine was written by Michael Lewis and first published in 2010. Lewis wrote the book to trace the many factors that led to the United States housing bubble, which burst catastrophically in 2008. By the time he...
"An Agony. As Now" was published in 1964 as a part of The Dead Lecturer: Poems, Baraka's second collection of poems. Though this was close to the date when Baraka became radicalized and left his family in Greenwich Village to pursue activism in...
As one of the premier writers of the mid-17th century, Aphra Behn’s often lighthearted poetry and drama should be all the more surprising because she was a woman able to make a livable career in the then-new literary marketplace. And this isn’t...
Daughters of the Dust is a film about the descendants of the Gullah people of the islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, directed by Julie Dash. It is the first American film directed by an African American woman to get a general...
Minority Report is a science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick called "The Minority Report." The screenplay was written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen and the score was composed by frequent...
After the critical and commercial success of Reservoir Dogs, and garnering considerable studio interest in scripts like Natural Born Killers and True Romance, Quentin Tarantino was one of the most sought-after directors in early-to-mid 1990s...
David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), loosely based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was nominated for a miraculous thirteen Academy Awards, winning three - Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best...
Heartland is a memoir by writer Sarah Smarsh to be published on September 18, 2018. Set in 1980's and 1990's Kansas, the book follow the story of young Smarsh, daughter of a poor wheat farmer. With themes of America's continuously changing...
Robert Graves is considered one of England's pre-eminent war poets - one of a group of young men whose poetry written in the trenches of France during World War One came to symbolize the awfulness of the conditions that they were sent to fight in,...
Coleridge composed "Metrical Feet" sometime between December 1806 and March 1807, enclosing it in a letter to his son, Derwent. Originally, the poem was composed in some form in December 1806 to assist Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley, with whom he...
In 1938, George Orwell published Homage to Catalonia, an autobiographical novel that detailed his participation and experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The war was fought between the left-leaning Republicans, who were forged in an alliance with...
Darkness at Noon is the best-known work of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler. It was published in 1940 during World War Two and speaks far louder about Koestler's feelings of disgruntlement and disillusionment with the Russian...
Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1937. Throughout her career, she has published 14 individual novels, as well as two collections of short stories. Godwin was raised in North Carolina, where she gradually picked...
The River Between is the first novel written and the second novel published by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote the book in 1965 while a student of English at Makerere University, an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda. It was...
Published in 1854, The Lamplighter is realistic fiction novel by American novelist Maria Cummins. The novel takes on a sentimental point of view, with themes that try to persuade the reader towards the righteous path of being kind towards...
Sometimes, writing feels easy: you sit at your desk, uncap your pen, and a poem pours out of you. But other times you struggle to figure out the first line, and you find yourself waiting for the words to form, for inspiration to strike. This is...
Stanley Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket in 1987, a full seven years after his previous project, the psychological horror film The Shining. Kubrick was contemplating making a war film as early as 1980, when he initiated contact with writer and...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the first and bestselling book by science journalist Rebecca Skloot. Blending the line between nonfiction and narrative, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and...
All the President's Men is a 1976 American political thriller film that follows Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as they uncover the crimes committed by the Nixon Administration, in what would come to be known as the...
Published in 1894, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is a collection of short stories and poems. It is one of the best-known and beloved works of children’s literature; however, Kipling’s complex views on colonialism and race justifiably factor...
The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself as a Science was written by Immanuel Kant in 1783. Kant was one of the greatest philosophers of the German Enlightenment. He worked to synthesize the two main...