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 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...
A Thousand Ships, which was first published in 2020, is author Natalie Haynes' retelling of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women who fought in it. The Trojan war, like all of the wars which preceded it and all of the wars which came...
Spare, Prince Harry's memoir (ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer, the critically acclaimed author of The Tender Bar) published to tremendous fanfare in early January 2023, was one of the most anticipated works of non-fiction in the past several...
Acclaimed screenwriting and author Monica Heisey's Really Good, Actually was published first in January 2023. It follows a young woman named Maggie, who is broke, recently divorced, and failing at her graduate school thesis. But she is only...
The title of Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, which was published in early 2023, is bound to attract attention. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is a mystery novel borrowed from the works of Agatha Christie,...
Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House was published in January of 2023. It is the follow-up to Hendrix's New York Times bestseller The Final Girl Support Group, which was published in 2021. How to Sell a Haunted House tells the story of a...
Kathryn Ma's The Chinese Groove was first published in late January 2023 by Counterpoint. It follows an eighteen-year-old boy named Shelley Zheng, whose family is reviled in her hometown Yunnan Province. He spends his days dreaming of a bigger and...
Our Share of Night is a novel by Mariana Enriquez, originally published in the author's native language, Spanish, in 2019. In October 2022, an English translation was published to spirited acclaim with tentative reservations. The reservations...
Nick and Charlie is author Alice Oseman's novella—first published in 2015 as an eBook and in 2020 as a paperback book—which continues the story of Nick and Charlie. At first glance, Nick and Charlie are the perfect couple: they are incredibly...
Author Alice Oseman is best known for two characters that she created: Charlie and Nick. Those characters (and other characters in Solitaire) were so compelling for potential publishers that a bidding war emerged for the right to publish Solitaire...
Lightlark, Alex Aster's novel for young adults, was initially published in late August 2022. As its title suggests, Lightlark is set on the island of Lightlark. Every 100 years like clockwork, Lightlark hosts what they call "Centennial." During...
Published in late 2022, author Jane Smiley's A Dangerous Business is set in the 1850s during the Gold Rush in California. Smiley's novel follows two prostitutes named Eliza and Jean who try to find their way in a state and country which is on the...
Daughter in Exile was published on January 31, 2023 by HarperVia. The follow-up to Adjapon's critically-acclaimed The Teller of Secrets, Daughter in Exile follows a young woman named Lola who immigrates from Senegal to the United States after she...
A Country You Can Leave, author Asale's Angel-Ajani's novel set to be published on February 27, 2023, follows a mother, named Yevgenia, and her teenaged daughter, named Lara, who are struggling to survive in the harsh California dessert. The...
Jane Harper's Exiles: A Novel was first published in November 2022 by Flatiron Books. Set in Australia, Exiles: A Novel follows an Australian federal investigator named Aaron Falk, who is on the way to a small town in wine country so that he could...
After Salman Rushdie was viscously attacked at an event in New York, few thought that he would live and even fewer thought that he would have a career again. As a result of the attack, which some have speculated was sanctioned and brought into...
Rebecca Makkai is an American author specializing in novels and short stories. Makkai was born in 1978 in Stokie, Illinois, USA. In her pursuit of education, Makkai attended Lake Forest Academy and later proceeded to Middlebury College and Lee...
Natalie L. Hynes was born in 1974 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and graduated from Cambridge University. Before venturing into her writing career, Hynes worked s as a comedian in several television stations as both a comedian and a panelist. When...
Empire of Wild is a novel by Cherie Dimaline, first published in 2019. Set in Canada, Empire of Wild tells the story of a young indigenous woman named Joan Beausoliel, who has spent the past year searching for her husband, named Victor after he...
Author Cherie Dimaline's VenCo: A Novel was first published on February 7, 2023. VenCo follows a young millennial named Lucky St. James who lives in a small apartment in Toronto with her grandmother, named Stella. One night, Lucky hearts the calls...
