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.
Lawyer, scholar, and activist Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, first published in 2010, is seen as nothing less than a phenomenon – a book that galvanized the debate about race in the criminal justice system in a way that had never been done...
Published in 2006, Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story confronts weighty issues—in particular, teen depression and suicide—through an unexpected combination of dark comedy and abiding hope. The novel is set in the present day, and is narrated...
Rear Window is based on a story from the February 1942 issue of Dime Detective Magazine called "It Had to be Murder", written by Cornell Woolrich (under the pseudonym William Irish). Alfred Hitchcock, who was a longtime fan of Woolrich's pulp...
Thirteen Reasons Why (stylized as TH1RTEEN R3ASONS WHY) by Jay Asher is a fictional Young Adult novel published in 2007 by Penguin Books. In July of 2011, the paperback edition became the #1 seller on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Asher's...
Americanah is the third novel of author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published in 2013 after the success of her novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Like her two prior novels, Americanah focuses on the lives of Nigerians,...
Wise Blood was the first of two novels written by Flannery O'Connor. Begun in 1947, some of its chapters appeared individually in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949 before it was published in its complete novel form...
Gone Girl was released on June 5, 2012, and was Flynn's third novel. Gone Girl was the #1 New York Times Bestseller for eight straight weeks and spent more than one hundred weeks on the bestseller list all together. By the end of 2012, Gone Girl...
The Girl on the Train is Paula Hawkins's fifth novel, but her first popular success. Unlike her previous four works, romantic comedies written under a pen name, The Girl on the Train takes on the darker themes of domestic violence and drug abuse....
Henry James began writing The American while living in Paris in the winter of 1875-1876. The novel first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in twelve serialized, monthly installments from June 1876 to May 1877. In May 1877, as the serialization...
Facundo is writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s most famous work, and a fascinating example of imaginative nonfiction. It is considered one of the premier works of Latin American literature and is read and studied widely there.
While...
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani, born on July 12, 1997. She always liked education, which wasn't something the Taliban liked at her time. The Taliban forbade girls from education, but Malala advocated for girls' education rights. This led to the...
A novella, Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad’s most famous work and a foundational text on the subject of colonialism. Heart of Darkness is based in part on a trip that Conrad took through modern-day Congo during his years as a sailor. He...
The Master and Margarita is a satire of the Stalin period in the Soviet Union, which was established ten years before Bulgakov started to write the novel. In the late 1920s, the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), led by Leopold...
The Praise of Folly is one of the most important books of Renaissance Humanism and one of the most perfect expressions of the sentiments and philosophy of its author, Desiderius Erasmus. Its historical importance cannot be overestimated; the...
Leif Enger wrote this best-selling novel in 2001. It is about the Land family’s journey to be reunited after a violent act forced them apart. The narrator, Reuben Land, is an 11 year old with severe asthma who perseveres through many difficulties....
Pat Barker penned Regeneration in 1991. The novel depicts the effects of World War I on the British officers and soldiers who are recovering at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. Set in 1917 and 1918, in the final years of the brutal...
“The Fish” is an oft-anthologized and -studied work, and is usually considered one of Moore’s finest poems. It was first published in 1918 in The Egoist, then slightly revised and included in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others for 1919: An Anthology of New...
As a child, White found complete happiness during summers in the Belgrade Lakes in Maine and this love of nature, which lasted his whole life, inspired all three of his children’s books. His first, Stuart Little took White about eighteen years to...
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) imagines Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two minor courtiers. In Stoppard's revision, the characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are not fully developed in the original play, fumble...
Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unspecified future. The book is written in the same style as many of Margaret Atwood's novels, that of speculative fiction. Although the book reads as if it is telling a...
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of Scotland’s most famous literary works, characterized by a macabre sensibility, postmodern narrative structure, and a beguiling blend of religious fanaticism, the gothic, political...
Holes is Louis Sachar's fifth novel, and probably his most loved. The novel took Sachar a year and a half to write, and was published in 1998. Holes combined huge popular appeal with critical success, as Holes won or was nominated for almost...
“Master Harold”…and the boys is a multifaceted, stirring testament to the cruelty of apartheid in South Africa. It is Athol Fugard’s most frequently performed and most popular play. Based on events from Fugard’s life, Master Harold is renowned for...
Mockingjay is the third and final installment in The Hunger Games series of novels by Suzanne Collins, completing the story of Katniss Everdeen which began in The Hunger Games (2008) and continued in Catching Fire (2009). By the time Mockingjay...