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.
Queen Elizabeth I gave this speech to her troops in August 1588, as they were gathered at Tilbury, Essex, one of the counties in the East Anglia region of England and one of the mainstays in the Tudor kingdom and very close to London. Her troops...
Penpal is the first novel by Dathan Auerbach. Auerbach did not originally set out to write a book; he began by posting macabre short stories on a subreddit called "nosleep". The first of these was "Footsteps" and he received such a positive...
Published in 2000, House of Leaves is the first novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. The book was aa huge success upon release, being translated into multiple other languages. One strange thing that makes the book stand out is its structure, a great...
Scottish writer Iain Banks is one of the most famous in the world among contemporary novelists. Critics regard him highly, and rightly so, in early 1999, according to a survey on the website of BBC News Banks got to the fifth place in the top ten...
“The Illiterate” is a sonnet by William Meredith first published in The Open Sea and Other Poems in 1958. Meredith was a homosexual writing in the Eisenhower era of coerced and enforced conformity. Thus the illiteracy of the poem’s situated...
The novel The Whisper was written by the British author named Emma Clayton and published in 2012. Emma Clayton is well-known author that wrote numerous children’s books, science fiction books that have as their main characters young men and women...
The Roar is a children's science fiction novel published by author Emma Clayton in 2009, and illustrated by Jim Murray. It was published in Britain in the same year as The Hunger Games was published in the USA, and worthwhile comparisons can be...
Ransom Riggs is an American novelist born on February 3, 1979 in Maryland. After graduating from Pine View School for the Gifted, he attended Kenyon College to study English literature and later enrolled at the University of Southern California to...
Hollow City is a second book, a continuation of the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children saga. It is an adventure fantasy novel that follows a group of peculiar children running away from wights-evil peculiars who are after their...
Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. As a teenager, she was heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, inspiring her to become an avid reader and writer. Her other...
A Hologram for the King is a 2012 fiction novel by the acclaimed American novelist Dave Eggers. This book was first published in 2012 by McSweeney's, an independent publishing company that was founded by Eggers himself. The novel follows the story...
The Declaration of Independence, the republican form of government outlined in the United States Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, the most illustrious statesmen of America's Revolutionary generation, were all products of the Founding...
The Street of Crocodiles was written by Bruno Schulz and is a collection of short stories. It was published in 1934, but in Polish. Celina Wisniewska translated the stories into English quite a while later, in 1963. Schulz had trouble publishing...
David Grossman is an Israeli novelist born on January 25, 1954 in Jerusalem, Israel. He grew up with limited means as his father was a librarian. However, it is because of his father that Grossman developed a love for reading and literature. As a...
Dee Brown was an American novelist born on February 28, 1908 in Alberta, Louisiana. He was an avid reader as a child and the book History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was particularly influential in developing...
An Essay Upon Projects was the very first work of literature to which Daniel Defoe publicly signed his name as author. Lacking neither ambition nor audaciousness, the essays lays out over the court of more 50,000 words a detailed and comprehensive...
Seabiscuit is the story of a very unlikely champion race horse and the three men who worked tirelessly to help him fulfil his deeply hidden potential. He was undersized with a lopsided gallop and a combative attitude when it came to being trained....
Dave Eggers is an American novelist born on March 12, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in a very scholarly and academia-focused family as his father was an attorney and his mother a teacher. After graduating high school, he attended...
Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Grey on January 31, 1872. Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship and studied dentistry. It was his dream, however, to become a writer. Grey taught himself how to write and worked...
Between 1854 and 1929, "orphan trains" transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned and homeless children from the coastal cities of the eastern United States to the Midwest for "adoption". Many of these children were first...
Published on May 14, 2013, Inferno is a thrilling mystery written by Dan Brown, starring the protagonist Robert Langdon again, making Inferno the fourth book in that series, along with Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol....
The Nightingale explores the stories of two sisters living in Nazi-occupied France and their involvement in the Resistance, a movement that swept through the nation of France following the German occupation through the end of the war. The...
The Christian book Heaven Is for Real was published in 2010 and became a New York Times bestseller. Later, in 2014, a feature film based on the book debuted and earned $101 million at the box office. It tells the true story of the author’s son,...
The Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter franchise (excluding Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) written by J. K. Rowling. It's a phenomenal conclusion to this epic saga and was published by Bloomsbury...