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.
If you are the type of person who loves when poets experiment a little with the basic essential rules of grammar, then Rainer Maria Rilke is your man. Navigating the world of Rilke’s prodigious verse is a voyage through a land where nouns become...
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a play written by riveting author Rajiv Joseph and was published during 2012 by Dramatists Play Service. This play tells the story of the life-changing impact a Bengal tiger has on two American Marines as well as...
Through a quirk of fate, Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, is considered the first novel written by an African-American, but not the first novel to be published in America by an African-American....
Half a Life is a novel written by V.S. Naipaul in 2001. The novel revolves around the story of Willie Somerset Chandran, whose father is a Brahmin from the Hindu caste system and his mother a Dalit. Willie's middle name 'Somerset' comes from the...
The Light in the Forest is a fictional novel written by the American author Conrad Richter and published in the year 1953. The novel is considered as being a coming of age novel because it follows the development of the main character, True Son.
...
Some may question why the greatest director of Westerns in Hollywood history was not the man that made the greatest Western in Hollywood history. The answer is surprisingly simple: John Ford’s most memorable films reveal how the settling of the...
A poet whose work was political to its core, Mahmoud Darwish was a prolific and at times controversial Palestinian poet. Over the course of his career, Darwish published over 30 poetry collections and eight prose collections (novels, essays etc)....
The Robbers is a play published in 1781 by the German playwright Friedrich Schiller. It is considered as being a very important play because it embodies the principles of the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany. The play became popular very fast...
"The Gambler" is the world-famous novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1866.
In 1863, Fyodor Dostoyevsky came to rest in Wiesbaden. There in a few days he lost all his money gambling. To get out of debt, he signed a...
Little Brother is a science-fiction novel that was published by Tor Books on April 29, 2008; it was written by the author Cory Doctorow. The story follows a group of teens during and after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, California. It...
Randy Pausch had a good life. He was the happily married father of 3 young children and had a highly successful career as a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He was universally beloved and, according to those who knew him well,...
Chang-rae Lee published a first novel, Native Speaker in 1995 to an extraordinarily receptive critical engagement. The honors and awards collected by Lee for freshman effort were the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Before...
Winner of the prestigious United States National Book Award for Fiction, In America is a novel by Susan Sontag published in 1999. The story centers around the famous real-life Polish actress Helena Modjeska and her life and acting career starting...
The novel Going After Cacciato was written by the American writer O’Brien and it was published in 1978. While many say that the novel is a war novel, the author claims it to be an anti-war novel, exploring the horrors and the way the soldiers were...
Remarkably, M.T. Anderson published his novel for young adults, Feed, prior to Twitter, Facebook and the avalanche of smartphone apps that track one’s every consumer interest. When it first reached the market, Feed was a cautionary tale about a...
Sarah Dessen is an American writer born on June 6, 1970 in Evanston, Illinois. Dessen’s parents were both English professors who inspired her love for literature early on in her childhood. After high school, she attended Greensboro College for a...
The Forest of Hands and Teeth is American author Carrie Ryan's breakout novel. It is a young adult fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which zombies roam the earth and threaten those who are still human.
The novel follows...
Annie on My Mind is a novel written by Nancy Garden in 1982. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Liza Winthrop and Annie Kenyo, who first meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and instantly become friends. Throughout the story, their...
How many novels have been written expressly for the purpose of getting married? Probably not a lot and at the top of the pack of that precious few sits This Side of Paradise which F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote because he needed the money for his...
Settlers of the Marsh is a novel first published in 1925 and written by Frederick Philip Grove. Grove was Canadian author and translator, especially while he was still living in Germany, where he translated a large volume of works. Once he moved...
The Struggle of the Naga Tribe is a play written by Indonesian poet, activist, actor, director and playwright W.S. Rendra. Many of Rendra's plays in the 1970s, including this one, were banned as the content of his work was a criticism of the...
The Black Stallion was published in 1941 and was written by Walter Farley whilst he was still in high school. It was published whilst he was an undergraduate at Columbia University and was an instant hit. Farley based the character of Alec Ramsay...
Virginia Hamilton published her young adult novel M.C. Higgins, the Great in 1974 and thereupon set a new standard for honors in that field. Hamilton became the first African-American writer in history to win the nation’s highest honor for...
The novel Volkswagen Blues is a novel that was written by Jacques Poulin. It was originally published in French in 1984 and was translated into English in 1988. The novel was well acclaimed, being nominated for the Governor General's Award for...
